There is a common popular conception that after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Western Europe descended into the "dark ages". People who are knowledgeable about history tend to refute this conception, pointing to things like the high level of continuity in Italy in the decades after 476, and the Frankish and Visigothic Kingdoms.
The one area that really did experience a "dark age" in the centuries after the Roman withdrawal is Southern Britain though.
Based on the differing post-Roman experience between Britain and Continental Europe, have Continental Europeans been less likely to view the post-Roman period as a "dark age"? Is the conception of this period as a "dark age" uniquely pronounced in the English speaking world?
The idea of the 'dark ages' is in many ways unique to the English language, not because of the post-roman transformation in Britain, but due to the the structural role that the Norman Conquest played in the periodisation of English history. It is this feature of traditional British historiography that still structures the use of this terminology, for example, in modern work on Archaeology, for example. Likewise, as a result, it's not clear to what extent other European languages actually have the same terminology. (For example, in German, they don't really even have a term for the 'dark ages', instead you would say the finsterer Mittelalter, or 'dark Middle Ages'.)
So there are a bunch of interrelated questions going on here and it's not totally clear to me how to best disentangle these, in part because the history of these ideas is less straightforward than simplistic narratives like 'enlightenment historiography' vs 'modern historiography' might suggest. And I think a better approach here is to see the significance and coercive force of narrative in the production of history.
But before getting on to that, there is a terminological point should be cleared up right at the start. 'The Dark Ages' is actually a uniquely Anglophone term. No other European language has this sort of parallel set of terms for the Middle Ages. Rather, to express the same idea, you add an adjective to the general term. So in German, for example, you can talk about the finsterer Mittelalter but there is not term for 'The Dark Ages' besides the Middles Ages (Mittelalter). As such, and quite importantly, the idea of the Middle Ages didn't supplant the idea of the Dark Ages, but these have always been inherently parallel terms. Likewise, the term 'medieval' hardly has a positive connotation in general English. Calling someone or something 'medieval' is never a compliment.
Likewise the very terminology in question here only began to solidify in the 17th century. The earliest example in English comes from 1570 for 'the middle age' and 1616 for 'the middle ages'. Even in latin most of the terminology doesn't antedate the 17th century. But, naturally enough, there are a variety of parallel terms: 'Barbarous Age(s), Dark Age(s), Obscure Age(s), Leaden Age(s), Monkish Ages, Muddy Ages, and of course the eighteenth-century favorite, Gothic Period.'^1 Indeed, the canonical division of world history into Ancient - Medieval - Modern itself only occurs with the Historia Medii Aevi of Christoph Keller from 1688, although the basic notion that we might divide history this way goes back to Petrarch. Although, importantly, Petrarch placed himself within the Dark Age: 'there was a more fortunate age and probably there will be one again; in the middle, in our time, you see the confluence of wretches and ignominy.'^2
And importantly, this theme of light and darkness, on which the language of 'The Dark Ages' is based, goes back to the Bible and saw pleny of use in other contexts. It was an especially important metaphor for the birth of Christ and the resultant sixth age of the world (a metaphor that Petrarch himself uses). But, we also find this, for example, in his introduction Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, the Carolingian scholar Walafred Strabo, writing around 840, explained that: 'the length and breadth of the kingdom committed to him by God, which was clouded and, if I might say this, nearly completely blind, he made - with light given by God - full of light again, and able to see, by a beaming-out of rays of all learning that was new and in part unknown before to this barbarous age.' Which, as Janet Nelson points out, would be a perfect prefiguration of Renaissance optimism did he not follow it with the next sentence: 'but now, with the pursuit of knowledge declining again into its opposite, the light of wisdom, because it is less cherished, is growing dimmer in many people.'^3
The point of this prelude is simply to note that the development of this terminology, and the concepts it denotes, is complicated and develops both earlier and later than many people seem to believe. But at no point on the journey was this terminology simply a neutral medium of historical analysis, it was always deeply embeded within specific and normally polemical narratives. It served Petrarch as a call to recapture the glory of Rome. For Strabo it was an invective against the chaos in the Carolingian world after Charlemange's death. It served the Protestant reformers, wishing to characterise the ignorance and backwardness of the preceeding 'Catholic' era and the authors of the Enlightenment or late 19th century to show the progress of reason and science over superstition and religion. This language always plays a role within a broader narrative and the content cannot be straightforwardly disentangled.
So the natural way to approach the question is probably from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For Gibbon the Middle Ages had no role to play in his story of the city of Rome and the idea of enlightnement values which he saw in Roman civilisation. Very explicitly and self-consciously, Gibbon is following Petrarch's narrative of a quasi-nationalist and Renaissance Rome. But there is more than a mere historical narrative here, the Middle Ages themselves were not a postive background to Gibbon's world in the 18th century. Thus we find the same thing, for example, in Hume's History of England. The Middle Ages serve as the barbarian antithesis to his notion of Enlightenment.
It is not until the 19th century (at least crudely put) that this changes, and that we see a cultural shift in the major stories being told about the Middle Ages. It is here in particular that the Middle Ages take up a dual significance both aesthetically for the Romantics and as an increasing basis for the national histories of European peoples. This is also the first time that the study of the Middle Ages becomes a mainstream academic persuit. For example, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the premier establishment for the study of the Middle Ages in the German Academy, was founded in 1819 to produce editions of medieval texts from 500-1500. Well more specifically for Quellenkunde, essentially the search for unique pieces of discrete historical information through the cross comparison for sources. But importantly, this is a nationalist institution, its motto is poigniantly 'Sanctus amor patriae dat animum' (The holy love of the fatherland gives spirit). It was designed as part of a broader story about the role that the Middle Ages played in the history of Germany, and we see analogous national bodies for the study of medieval texts emerge in other countries. For example, the Rolls Series for Britain in 1857. But while there is a sense in which the early 19th century sees the first turn from the enlightenment narrative of the Middle Ages, the mid to late 18th century also sees the most defined and pervasive use of 'The Dark Ages' as a specific term.
The next major change is that from the late 19th to early 20th century. In 1889, Samuel R. Maitland could publish a book called The Dark Ages, subtitled a series of essays intended to illustrate the state of religion and literature in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. While his project here was to promote the postive aspects of the medieval monastic system, to rub off 'some of the dirt which has been heaped upon it', the language and framework of the dark ages is presupposed as current.
In England, at least, from the turn of twentieth century this had changed. As Nelson perceptively suggests, this probably brings us to the heart of the bifercation of English terminology, since in England the central feature of the national medieval history that needed addressing was the Norman Conquest. As such, from the turn of the century, the Dark Ages/Middle Ages distinction began to be coopted in academic circles to this end. We see this in William Paton Ker's 1904 book, The Dark Ages. Ker notes in the introduction that although until recently the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages had been synonymous, they have become divided, with the former now referring to the first half and the Middle Ages to the second (from 1100). But importantly, this distinction essentially overlies the Norman Conquest. Thus, even till very recently (Nelson gives examples up to 1997), the distinction of this terminology has been used in English historiography to tell a story of Anglo-Saxons and Normans. This can either present the efficiency and proto-modernity of Norman fudalism (as Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England 1943) or the romantic attraction of the heros of a bygone era, as in Ker.
Despite this more marginal English use, by the interwar, the Dark Ages it seems to have passed out of general relevance. Mommsen compares the eleventh (1911) and fourteenth (1929) editions of the Encyclopaedia Britanica. The former proclaims that 'the dark Age was a reality' and it covered the fifth to tenth century. The latter, however, the term no longer has an entry.
Likewise, Nelson's article is framed around a 1931 University of Vinna PhD Dissertation by Lucie Varga entitled 'Das Schlagwort vom "finsteren Mittelalter"' (The term "The Dark Middle Ages"), wherein she suggests that the term has not been used for a long time: 'The dark Middle Ages represented an outlook that for a long time now has not been ours'.^4