In the Dark Ages

Plus ça change:

Have you ever heard people talking about the Dark Ages? This is the name given to the period which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire when very few people could read or write and hardly anyone knew what was going on in the world. And because of this, they loved telling each other all sorts of weird and wonderful tales and were generally very superstitious.

E.H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World, trans. Caroline Mustill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Gombrich’s book was first published in 1936 as Eine furze Weltgeschichte für jungle Leser [A short world history for young readers]. I wish this work had been around in translation when I was ten or twelve. Reading about the Dark Ages today, I cannot help thinking of the lunatic conspiracy theories that now fill our bandwidth.