In the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Middle Ages was seen as an "Age of Faith" when religion reigned, and thus as a period contrary to reason and contrary to the spirit of the Enlightenment.K. J. Christiano, W. H. Swatos and P. Kivisto, Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments (Rowman Altamira, 2002), p. 77. For them the Middle Ages was barbaric and priest-ridden. They referred to "these dark times", "the centuries of ignorance", and "the uncouth centuries".R. Bartlett, Medieval Panorama (Getty Trust Publications, 2001), p. 12. The Protestant critique of the Medieval Church was taken into Enlightenment thinking by works including Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89).S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: the Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 213. Voltaire was particularly energetic in attacking the religiously dominated Middle Ages as a period of social stagnation and decline, condemning Feudalism, Scholasticism, The Crusades, The Inquisition and the Catholic Church in general.
