From Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance (p. 102):
"From its inception, the word Renaissance was a smear on the age that came before, rebirth coming to fix something wrong. Historians have tried to change the name, but it's hard to find another label for the period. Normal parlance in the History Lab now is (sigh) early modern, which is (to paraphrase Churchill) the worst name for the period, except for all the rest."
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Continued (p. 104):
"Many hear [early modern] and think steam engines and early skyscrapers, but in the History Lab we mean the period after medieval and before the French Revolution. What we get by using early modern instead of Renaissance is that we avoid implying that the Middle Ages were bad, but early modern worsens the degree to which choosing a start date involves a judgment call about what makes us modern."