Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean-Jacques Ampère first used the term in the 1830s, referring to a Carolingian Renaissance and a 12th-century renaissance. He countered the prevailing view, associated with Jules Michelet, that the Middle Ages were culturally regressive.
The three medieval renaissances are the Carolingian Renaissance of the 8th and 9th centuries, the Ottonian Renaissance of the 10th century, and the Renaissance of the 12th century. Erna Patzelt, Hans Naumann, and Charles H. Haskins established this framework in scholarly works published in 1924 and 1927.
The Carolingian Renaissance was a top-down project driven by royal patronage and executed by ecclesiastical elites, whereas the Italian Renaissance involved wider social movements. Carolingian scholars framed their work as correctio, a correction of older knowledge to serve a unified Christian society, not a secular humanist revival.
Pope Sylvester II and Abbo of Fleury were leading intellectual figures. The Ottonian Renaissance depended on the patronage of Otto I, Otto II, and Otto III, rulers of the Saxon Dynasty. Women of the royal family, including Empress Theophanu, Matilda, and Adelaide, also shaped the court's cultural life.
The 12th-century Renaissance coincides with major economic and social transformations, making it broader in scope than the Carolingian or Ottonian revivals. Increased contact with the Islamic world, the Crusades, and the Reconquista gave European scholars access to Greek and Arabic scientific and philosophical texts, which the new medieval universities placed at the center of their curricula.
Clement of Ohrid and Naum of Preslav compiled the Cyrillic alphabet during the reign of Boris I of Bulgaria. It was declared the official alphabet in Bulgaria in 893, along with Old Church Slavonic as the official language. The cultural peak of this period, the Golden Age of medieval Bulgarian culture, came during the reign of Emperor Simeon I the Great from 889 to 927.