It's from his poem *Africa* (1343) according to Google, referring to the troubles of his own time. It's all rather vague and poetic.

Ofc this is Petrarch

By the look of it, you want this article. www.jstor.org/stable/2856364 which traces it to some somewhat passing remarks in letters, where he talks about his plans to write about illustrious men of certain ages, but not to "drag his pen" through "tenebrae" for the sake of a few famous names.

So, while it looks like Petrarch did have the overall "dark times" opinion - he comes back to similar language in several places - ultimately, it looks a little like an excuse by an author to draw a line somewhere and get his damn book finished.

Just looking at it rn

Or, putting it another way, given that Petrarch clearly thought his "Dark Ages" fully encompassed his own time, you could just see him as a common-or-garden Golden Age writer, and "Dark" was originally just his antonym of "Golden".

I did do a double take at that one!

This is the start of the paper trail I've seen (I don't have the library access to dig into it) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarc...

Ref 4a, Renaissance or Prenaissance? by Lynn Thorndike, does mention both Petrarch and dark ages, but there is absolutely no link between the two that I can discern. Looks like shoddy scholarship by whoever added that reference to the Wikipedia article.

The second article is the one you want. Here's one key page - haven't got time to read further, need to go!

bsky.app/profile/0xcd...

Petrarch, not Plutarch?

Yeah him too

Weren't they both the Blue Peter dogs in the 1970s? Seriously, this is a lovely thread. I remember the joy of using JSTOR in the 2000s for my MA, with full text searches possible, compared with the Stone Age manual searching in the 1980s for my BA.

Plenty of information on JSTOR, but this is a good start: Mommsen, Theodore E. “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages.’” Speculum 17, no. 2 (1942): 226–42.

Ok got it. This is great and confirms my view that the simplistic ‘dark ages’ is very much misattributed to Petrarch.

Not so fast! My fault for only skimming the first few pages of that article (I had to rush off to a meeting). Yes early on Petrarch still uses the original Christian metaphor where JC = light. But after becoming poet laureate and his first visits to Rome ...