Are the Renaisance and the Age of Enlightenment the same period of time?

No. Renaissance first, Enlightenment next

thanks @josie

No, the Italian Renaissance starts towards the end of the 1200s, peaks in the 1400s, and is really over by the 1600s. The Northern Renaissance is mostly the 1400s and 1500s. The Enlightenment is the 1700s.

The Renaissance started in Italy (DaVInci, Michelangelo, etc) then spread west until it ended in England—the English Renaissance ends, pretty much, with Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The Renaissance is considered a ‘rebirth’ from the Medieval times—people started to look beyond their farm fields for inspiration, political and economic systems changed, and people started to value art, literature, music and architecture again after these had been repressed for centuries by the Catholic Church. The Renaissance, by no means, was humanitarian—prisons and punishments were still barbaric and the government and rich people still held totalitarian style powers.

The Enlightenment begins about 1680 (depending on which book you look at). Europe had become more humanistic and started to think about how we all worked together best. Science became huge—Galileo had already made his discovery and the impact was still rippling. Newton, the microscope, global travel, etc encouraged the scientific revolution. The first scifi book was written and philosophers like Locke and Hobbes looked at human’s power of reason. People began to question the power of the government and discussed how powers would be best distributed, what the role of the government should be and looked to Socrates, Aristotle and Plato for ideas. Our founding fathers were Enlightenment folks—and the Enlightenment ended when the French went nuts during their revolution and proved that humans could not always be logical and couldn’t always be trusted to be reasonable.

Look at it this way—Renaissance = artistic expression, creativity, emotions, some science. Enlightenment = logic, lots of science, debate, analysis of what makes humans human, analysis of human capabilities.

A few additional comments. For better and for worse, the Italian Renaissance saw the beginning of capitalism. Banking, corporations, insurance and double entry bookkeeping are all from this time.

There is no name attached to it, but the seventeenth century was to mathematics what the fifteenth century was to art. Logarithms, probability, analytic geometry and calculus all came out of this century.

Thank you @Aethelflaed and @linguaphile and @LostInParadise. That was really really helpful.