So while some traditional historians argue that the Renaissance is separate from the Middle Ages, recently there has been some push back against that idea in favor of considering the Renaissance just an extension of the Middle Ages.

This is because there has been continuous debate over the idea that the Renaissance is "modern" compared to the Middle Ages, and the idea that before the 1400s, everything was "less advanced." You've probably heard the term the "Dark Ages" to refer to the Middle Ages, and one of the reasons why some people don't use this term anymore, is because it implies that from about 450-1400, everything/person in Europe was dirty/uneducated/dying of disease all the time etc. When obviously now we understand that yes, people in the Middle Ages did take baths! And they didn't just completely forget the history of Ancient Rome or Greece!

However this misconception popularized the difference between the time periods. As well as some historians have argued for "pre/proto-Renaissance" periods in Europe, particularly with works like the Inferno.

The reason why some of these works of literature are considered Renaissance is because they have particular aspects that make them similar to Renaissance literature. The Inferno I can particularly speak on, as the Renaissance is characterized by its focus on Greek/Roman philosophy, interpreting religious ideas differently, etc. The Inferno shares a lot of these ideas, having Virgil be a guiding character in Dante's journey, his reimagining of Hell to be made of the now well known nine circles, and more. Because of these reasons, we now consider the Inferno to be a work of Renaissance literature, despite it not fitting into the time period.

And I agree, it is frustrating to see the idea of "medieval - bad renaissance -good" that is perpetuated in high school history textbooks sometimes. However, there has been a shift in ideas as I have mentioned. A lot of historians and scholars (including myself!) have agreed that in fact while the Renaissance may be different from the Middle Ages, that doesn't mean that it's "better."

While I haven't read it yet, I would recommend The Bright Ages by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele, which is about refuting the idea that the Middle Ages were a time of ignorance.

Luckily the public opinion on the Middle Ages is shifting! People during the Middle Ages weren't stupid! They just lived in a different world than we do!

You've already received a couple of excellent answers (be sure to check out the one by u/qed1, since it's a reply to the top level answer and it's possible you don't receive a separate notification), but I wanted to add some brief thoughts about: 1) the Renaissance as a concept of "periodization"; 2) ideas that distinguish Renaissancey things from ewww Dark Ages; does The Renaissance even exist?

If we say that the Renaissance it's a period of time, an era, starting with the fall of Costantinople, then we cannot say that something happened one or two centuries before 1453 belongs to the Renaissance. Things are different if we use the term to indicate a cultural movement of classicism in the arts, literature, philology, philosophy et cetera, then the term becomes more meaningful and helpful. Certainly, the fact that such movement first flourished in Italy and later in other parts of Europe, can also lead to some apparent paradoxes.

It is certainly possible to affirm that Italian Renaissance has its roots in the XIII century: in sculpture and architecture, for example, works from the school of Pisa, such as Niccolò Pisano (b. 1210s- d. 1280s) and his son Giovanni (d. 1315), and other contemporaries such as Arnolfo di Cambio (d. 1310), inaugurated a new era of artistic naturalism (Niccolò's two masterpieces, the pulpit of Pisa's baptistry and the pulpit of Siena's Cathedral, even contains citations to ancient sculpure and architecture, and harmonizes classical and Christian themes in a way similar to artists lived one or two centuries later - you have to have at least some knowledge of art history to tell the difference).

In literature, we can see humanism in the literary school of Padua, composed by scholars who often worked as jurists, such as Lovato Lovati (1240-1309), sometimes called the real (whatever that means) first humanist, Albertino di Mussato (1261 - 1329) and others. In Florence, we can hardly be contradicted if we name Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) a humanist.

But in other European countries, the Renaissance humanism arrived a century later or even more: in France it arrived in the half of the XV century, and the first humanist of note was Jacques Lefebvre d'Etaples; in Spain, more or less in the same period, especially through the transmission of ideas between the two branches of the House of Aragon (we could even say that Hungary saw the arrival of humanist ideas some decades earlier under Matthias Corvinus, in this case through a royal marrying with the princess of Naples, and the enthusiastic patronage of king Matthias himself); Austria and then Germany saw the flourishing of classicism in those same years, while England had to wait the end of the War of the Two Roses. That's why using the Renaissance as a "time period" can only work if we imagine a "diachronic" Europe where in, say, 1297 Northern Italy is in the magnificent and modern Renaissance and in the meantime London is in the dark ages and can only see a dim light yet to come 2 centuries later.

So, yeah, in the text under your question you allude to the possibility that the Renaissance is just a "commonality" of ideas and not a chronological periodization. So what could these ideas be? Certainly classicism is (not just the love of the classics, but the conscious imitation of classical - ie. relative to Greco-Roman culture - models in various ways). It's undeniable that there was a break from the realism and naturalism of Greco - Roman art to a more abstract and stylized art (whence the meme lol medieval art sucks). But the break was conscious, not due to a fall of IQ or something (Picasso could also paint normally); and we know because while Niccolò Pisano was experimenting that naturalism I cited before, other artists knowingly and explicitly clung to tradition - indeed, Niccolò's own son Giovanni was more into gothic art and this can be easily seen in works continued by him after his father's death). Certainly, classicism in art is a defining feature in the Renaissance.

What about literature? The love for Latin classical authors like Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, Vergil and Statius is found in almost every scholar and grammarian uninterruptedly through the Medieval period; while in the Early Middle Ages the catastrophic conditions of Western Europe after the fall of the Empire made the resurrection of a cultural life very difficult, the so called Carolingian Renaissance (750-850 c.) helped a fair number of erudite scholars thrive in the Latin and the Cathedral schools founded by Charlemagne, his successors, and rich patrons (both nobles and members of the high clergy). [A lot of these scholars even knew Greek Edit: not really, see u/qed1's reply]. The keen enthusiasm for classical literature and philosophy that oozes from the letters by Lupus Servatus (d.862) (who has been called a proto-humanist), just to name one, is frankly not that different from that of much later humanists. He was also a fervid collector of manuscripts, whom he copied, preserved, and lent to other like-minded scholars who asked for them. Again, not unlike Petrarch. And I don't see why a Neoplatonist philosopher like John Scotus Eriugena couldn't be a friend of Ficino (admittedly, he was one of a kind in the IX century). The writing of commentaries, paraphrases, compilations and "centoes" of Latin authors, the imitation of their style and contents and even erudite citations is something we can found in all Latin (or vulgar) medieval literature.

The revival of Greek language and Greek philosophy and literature is something certainly characteristic of the Renaissance, but 1) the revival of the Greek language had already begun by the XIV century, with Byzantine scholars like Demetrios Kydones mesazon (1320-1398), Manuel Kalekas (1360-1410), Manuel Chrysoloras (1350-1415), not including Graeco-Sicilian scholars, and both Greek schools and textbooks existed in Italy before 1453 (which remains an important date for the Renaissance movement anyway); 2) while most non-scientific Greek literature and poetry had indeed to wait the XV century to be widely known in the West, scientific, medical and philosophical works had already been translated into Latin, from Arabic or directly from Greek, between XI and XIV century (when Niccolò da Reggio translated Galen, already available from Arabic, directly from Greek). But while Aristotle's whole extant corpus was known, of Plato only the Timaeus had been inherited by the Latin-speaking mediaval world: the full recovery of Plato and other philosophers in the Platonic tradition (Plutarch, Plotinus etc), and also other thinkers, had a huge impact on Western culture.

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