<P> There is a sharp drop from 34 volumes in the 9th century to just 8 in the 10th . The 11th century, with 13, evidences a certain recovery, and the 12th century, with 40, surpasses the 9th, something the 13th, with just 26, fails to do . There was indeed a' dark age', in Baronius's sense of a "lack of writers", between the Carolingian Renaissance in the 9th century and the beginnings, some time in the 11th, of what has been called the Renaissance of the 12th century . Furthermore, there was an earlier period of "lack of writers" during the 7th and 8th centuries . So, in Western Europe, two' dark ages' can be identified, separated by the brilliant but brief Carolingian Renaissance . </P> <P> Baronius's' dark age' seems to have struck historians, for it was in the 17th century that the term started to proliferate in various European languages, with his original Latin term saeculum obscurum being reserved for the period he had applied it to . But while some, following Baronius, used' dark age' neutrally to refer to a dearth of written records, others used it pejoratively, lapsing into that lack of objectivity that has discredited the term for many modern historians . </P> <P> The first British historian to use the term was most likely Gilbert Burnet, in the form' darker ages' which appears several times in his work during the later 17th century . The earliest reference seems to be in the "Epistle Dedicatory" to Volume I of The History of the Reformation of the Church of England of 1679, where he writes: "The design of the reformation was to restore Christianity to what it was at first, and to purge it of those corruptions, with which it was overrun in the later and darker ages ." He uses it again in the 1682 Volume II, where he dismisses the story of "St George's fighting with the dragon" as "a legend formed in the darker ages to support the humour of chivalry". Burnet was a bishop chronicling how England became Protestant, and his use of the term is invariably pejorative . </P> <P> During the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, many critical thinkers saw religion as antithetical to reason . For them the Middle Ages, or "Age of Faith", was therefore the opposite of the Age of Reason . Kant and Voltaire were vocal in attacking the Middle Ages as a period of social regress dominated by religion, while Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire expressed contempt for the "rubbish of the Dark Ages". Yet just as Petrarch, seeing himself at the cusp of a "new age", was criticising the centuries before his own time, so too were Enlightenment writers . </P>

Which event more than any other signified the beginning of the dark ages in europe