Answer:
Today, the period in Europe from about the year 500 through approximately 1500 CE is called the Middle Ages, or the medieval era (the word medieval comes from the Latin medium aevum, literally middle age). But of course people who lived at that time did not think of themselves as being in the middle of anything—they, like we, referred to their own time as “modern.” A seventeenth-century German historian, Christoph Keller, first came up with the idea of dividing history into ancient, medieval, and “new period.”
The cultural phenomenon called the Renaissance began in Italy during the fourteenth century and spread throughout much of Europe by the end of the sixteenth century. It involved a flowering of art and scholarly and philosophical pursuits, often inspired by a renewed interest in the Classical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Some historians of the nineteenth century saw the Renaissance as a sharp break with the medieval “dark ages,” a sudden burst of intellectual light after the supposed gloom and stagnation of the Middle Ages.