Giorgio Vassari first used the term Renaissance, rinascita, to describe the idea of revival in classical styles in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period in his work The Lives of the Artists (1550). This was not a particularly widespread term at the time, although it was occasionally used. The modern term Renaissance is adapted through French into renaissance via the 19th century French historian Jules Michelet. He is also key to the idea of it as a historical period, whereas Vassari was thinking in terms of an artistic transition. Nevertheless, we can see through Vassari that people at the time did consciously think of themselves as part of a distinct point in history that they were comparing to other time periods, and indeed the Renaissance as a historiographical idea is inspired by the ideal conception of what was going on from people like Vassari. Modern historiography has done much to scrutinise the reality, and it is now also a time famous for cutthroat politics, as in The Borgias or The Tudors which make this into soap.

It was the earlier proto-Renaissance thinker Petrarch, who advanced the revival of the classical ideal- a more political ideal than Vassari's art- who first hinted at the idea of a dark age. Flavio Biondo in his History of the Decline of The Roman Empire (1483) first articulated the idea of inferior medieval age that was ended by the Renaissance, dating the period from 412 to 1412 as essentially the dark times Petrarch lived in. This gives us both the Renaissance, which Petrarch and Biondo lead up to before Vassari first uses the term, and it gives us "The Dark Ages" and the Medieval Period which are invented primarily in order to advance and distinguish the idea of a Renaissance. Attachment to Antiquity was not new given it was common in the Medieval, and they did not actually recreate the classical world in any real sense. But the changes were motivated by this sort of historical otaku or fanfic impulse if you like; an ideal, stylish vision of the past recreated through the application of these ideals and styles.

Similarly, the Enlightenment was properly coined as a historiographic idea in the 19th century, which was the foundation period of modern academic history, but it does have some basis in the ideas and terms of the time. Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos in Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1733) first used Lumières (Enlighteners), which was also later referred to Emmanuel Kant in Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (1784), where the German term Aufklärung means more specifically "Enlightenment". The Enlightenment was possibly even more self-conscious in attempting to make a new movement, because it was the time when novelty and sincerity came to take over from the Medieval and Renaissance emphasis on precedent and prudence, so they made no bones about creating their own ideas rather than an idea of a return.

Antiquity was a term of the Medieval and Early Modern times derived from French, which is obviously important in the Renaissance given their relationship to it.