Well, duh. Once we invented modernity in 1450, we never did anything bad again.

Life's much easier as a physicist. Something interesting happened at some point, maybe 13.79 billion years ago or whatever, and we're just trying to work out what it was and how it all hangs together. Although I'd like to recommend using error bars, because maybe they'll help a bit?

In that context, the *actual* Dark Ages (like, literally, dark) began around 370,000 years after the Big Bang, and then gradually ended as structures started to emerge about 150 million years later, and maybe wasn't properly over until a billion years had passed.

Y'see? Big fat error bars, and we're totally chillaxed about the whole thing. In cosmological terms, 1450 is so close you can't even tell if it happened 400,000 years ago or next week.

Archaeology also benefits from this trick (though to a lesser extent). I was once off on a date by a million years in a seminar, which my supervisor described as ‘close enough’.

Preach it! Calculations are for mathematicians and accountants. In the real world we deal with estimates!

Should I start saying "close enough for archaeological time" instead of "close enough for government work"?

The universe is hydrogen exploring its potential?

I love that. However, physicists don’t think about what motivates hydrogen. Physics is all out there, doing its thing, never changing (afawk). History by contrast is created all the time, and re-created in each generation, and it definitely affects the present and future. So cool. 😎

The Hundred Years War was indeed the war that ended all wars.

Famously the Renaissance arrived just a year later as a range of furniture in the Argos catalogue.

It's always a tell when someone lumps the Reformation in with the Enlightenment, and then act as though both are basically modern rationalism.

The European reformation was the start of some sort of rationalism

I mean…not really? In the “everything is linked to everything” sense, yes. But in number of important ways, no.

Famed rationalist, Martin "reason is the Devil's greatest whore" Luther

Admittedly, "rationalism was invented when a minor south German cleric got really pissed off at an Augsburg banker" is a very funny argument

they're called "protestants" because they protested all the bad things that were happening at which point they stopped.

Depends on how you define the early modern period. Hugh T-R - "The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries". That puts it in the early modern period for me.

Joel is being sarcastic. Witch-burning is an early modern phenomenon, not a medieval one.

The Witch Cult in Modern London

I remember earlier this year a lot of people posting things about "Trump will take us back to the dark ages" with pictures of... the Spanish Inquisition.

To be fair, the Inquisition was pretty dark.

Indeed - has nobody seen the lighting in Caravaggio's paintings?