Both "The Renaissance" and "The Enlightenment" were names given by participants/proselytizers to their own times, as a way of trying to convince others that they were indeed living in new times. It is not unlike people calling ours "The Information Age" — it isn't a category imposed by historians, it is a category used to various rhetorical/ideological effect by people in it.

Historians frequently debunk these kinds of categories. The idea of "The Renaissance" presupposes everything being quite quiet, sleepy, and "backward" prior to it. That's not quite true; it's less of a massive break from the past than it lets on. Similarly with "The Enlightenment." The idea that Information only became an important category in the 1960s is foolish, of course.

This is not to say that change does not occur, and sometimes it can be very rapid indeed, so that people can see it in front of their eyes. (My grandmother's first job was a switchboard operator; by the end of her life, she was on the Internet. That's a pretty big change!) But these categories are meant to exaggerate the demarcation between periods, habits of thoughts, institutions, etc. They're a way to say, "everything is new now!" Again, historians tend to find this problematic; it's OK to talk about these claims, but it's tricky to take them seriously.

Similarly we should note that "progression" depends on where you think society is going. There have always been those who have said, this thing that some of you call "progress," it is actually madness/descent/sinfulness/error/idiocy/etc. And of course these categories can be challenged in retrospect — eugenics has gone from something heralded as scientific and progressive to seen as pseudoscience and thinly-veiled racism/classism.

I guess I would summarize "the historians' take" as "beware categories of progress!" Or at least, be aware that they are not to be taken at face value.