LAST MONTH, THE ECONOMIST TYLER COWEN interviewed the writer and investor Paul Graham on his podcast. There he asked one of those classic interview questions: if you had a time machine, where would you go? Graham confessed that he struggled to resist the “obvious answer”, ancient Athens. But in the end, he opted for somewhere less conventional. “Provence in 600 — I would be very interested to see that.” He was compelled by “morbid curiosity” to find out “what the hell was going on in Dark-Age Europe”; he was “deliberately using” that term, he added, “because they’re trying to outlaw it”.
Who’s trying to outlaw the “Dark Ages”? The campaign is led mainly by academics who, having devoted much of their lives to illuminating the period, have developed a natural sympathy towards it, and hope to rescue it from the condescension of posterity. In 2017 the medieval historian Eleanor Janega wrote a punchy article called “There’s no such thing as the Dark Ages, but OK”. “If you take the time to actually, you know, study the medieval period,” she informs us, “it becomes very apparent very quickly that there was a tremendous amount of intensive thought happening” — epitomised by Thomas Aquinas, a “badass philosopher who will think you under the fucking table”.
Janega’s view is shared by many. The Twitter account “Fake History Hunter”, boasting over 250,000 followers,
