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The term “Dark Ages” has been used to denote the period of history perceived as the cultural, economic, and demographic deterioration in Western Europe, beginning with the decline of the Western Roman Empire (which officially ended in a.d. 476) up to the beginning of the Renaissance (the rebirth of classical culture) in Italy. The idea that this period was a dark age is generally attributed to the Renaissance scholar Petrarch in the 1330s. The term was at one point adopted to characterize the whole of the Middle Ages (roughly a.d. 300–1300). The phrase “Dark Ages” employs traditional light-dark dualism, well known to religious writers throughout the centuries. The phrase contrasts earlier and later periods of intellectual brilliance and cultural achievement with the medieval age of decline in learning and literacy in Roman literature, including a decrease in contemporary written history, a diminishing of European population groups, and a lack of significant achievement in material culture. The sense in which Latter-day Saint Church leaders over the years have used the phrase “Dark Ages” is tied to a decline in spiritual learning and scriptural literacy in the Middle Ages. President Joseph Fielding Smith noted that ignorance prevailed in the Dark Ages: “A man with learning could enter the ministry, and the common people were kept in darkness, more particularly concerning the scriptures, and the idea prevailed that the scriptures were not to be had by the common people” (1:178).— LDS Beliefs
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