[Sherman Logan]

Among European countries, incidentally, only the English use the term “Dark Ages”; Henry VIII and his successors had reasons to make all things Catholic look dark.

Untrue. The concept originated in the 1330s with Petrarch and was well developed by humanists in the Renaissance before the Reformers came along.

The idea is self-flattering, of course, as it refers to the "dark" period between classical civilization and its rebirth, midwived by the humanists, in the Renaissance.

The term itself was invented by Baronius, a Catholic historian, around 1600. "The new age (saeculum) which was beginning, for its harshness and barrenness of good could well be called iron, for its baseness and abounding evil leaden, and moreover for its lack of writers (inopia scriptorum) dark (obscurum)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

[lavaroise]

Some coincide it with the degradation occuring after the rise of Islam.