"The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews “God’s Philosophers”"

"The myth goes that the Greeks and Romans were wise and rational types who loved science and were on the brink of doing all kinds of marvelous things (inventing full-scale steam engines is one example that is usually, rather fancifully, invoked) until Christianity came along. Christianity then banned all learning and rational thought and ushered in the Dark Ages. Then an iron-fisted theocracy, backed by a Gestapo-style Inquisition, prevented any science or questioning inquiry from happening until Leonardo da Vinci invented intelligence and the wondrous Renaissance saved us all from Medieval darkness...

The online manifestations of this curiously quaint but seemingly indefatigable idea range from the touchingly clumsy to the utterly shocking, but it remains one of those things that "everybody knows" and permeates modern culture...

Far from being a stagnant dark age, as the first half of the Medieval Period (500-1000 AD) certainly was, the period from 1000 to 1500 AD actually saw the most impressive flowering of scientific inquiry and discovery since the time of the ancient Greeks, far eclipsing the Roman and Hellenic Eras in every respect. With Occam and Duns Scotus taking the critical approach to Aristotle further than Aquinas' more cautious approach, the way was open for the Medieval scientists of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries to question, examine, and test the perspectives the translators of the Twelfth Century had given them, with remarkable effects"

http://www.strangenotions.com/gods-philosophers/

This is a total must-read - a good friend of mine has an undergraduate degree in Medieval European History, and so I know that most of what I think I know about the era is wrong but I don't know like exactly how outside of the specific pieces she studied (hella awesome Monks!).

And there is definitely an important piece in here about the distinction between being atheist and being anti-Christian, and being a scientist and being anti-Christian and how many ways those things are collapsed by people trying to fully present an over-constructed identity.