Dark Ages

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. ~ James A. Michener

Dark Ages is a term which arose with expressions of the Italian scholar Petrarch as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature, later expanded to refer to the transitional period between Roman times and the High Middle Ages; it has also since become more broadly applied to any period to be denoted as one of ignorance and confusion.

Sourced

• An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
  • James A. Michener, in Space (1982)

• It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.
  • Henry David Thoreau, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

• The 10^th incarnation of The Doctor: They've still got one foot in the Dark Ages — if I tell them the truth they'll panic and think it was witchcraft.
  Martha Jones: OK. What was it then?
  The Doctor [Pauses briefly, stares grimly at her]: Witchcraft.
  • Gareth Roberts, in The Shakespeare Code (2007) for the Doctor Who television series (originally written as Love's Labour's Won, based upon the legendary "lost play" of William Shakespeare)