Renaissance

 It's kind of interesting that people didn't know that they were living in a time called the "renaissance." The term used to refer to the period of time is 19th Century!  It was first an artistic movement, then a period of time when that artistic movement occurred, and then applied to science and other cultural things that are not artistic per se. It's historiography, the retrospective view of things, that allows us to make up these categories. I guess ren. intellectuals thought of themselves as humanists?

I think it does matter how people conceived of history while they were actually experiencing it.  We did think of ourselves as in "the space age" when we were children (we = my generation.).