The Middle Ages: Birth of an Idea, the phrase “Middle Ages” Starting around the 14th
century, European thinkers, writers and artists began to look back and
celebrate the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Accordingly,
they dismissed the period after the fall of Rome as a “Middle” or even
“Dark” age in which no scientific accomplishments had been made, no
great art produced, no great leaders born. The people of the Middle Ages
had squandered the advancements of their predecessors, this argument
went, and mired themselves instead in what 18th-century English
historian Edward Gibbon called “barbarism and religion."
