I was wondering when the idea of a middle age occurred. It wasn't during the Middle Ages, because those people thought they were modern. Also, when did there renaissance think of itself as a renaissance? It turns out that the concept of medieval could only arise with the renaissance itself. But the term renaissance wasn't even used in English until the 19th Century. It arose in Italy first (no surprise). Other terms like baroque are not contemporaneous with the periods in question. Mozart didn't know he was "classical."
I still don't know when the concept of renaissance was introduced in Spain itself. We tend to use other categories, like "Golden Age."
Modernity arose when we could conceive of a tripartite division of history. Antiquity / Middle Ages / and Modern. Renaissance and baroque are early modern. Then we have Neo-classicism and Enlightenment, then romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism.
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