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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