the.com/age of enlightenment

means A European intellectual movement, roughly the 17th–18th centuries, that championed reason, science, and individual rights over inherited authority and religious dogma.

from From 'enlighten' — Old English leohtan, 'to illuminate' — paired with 'age' meaning era. The capitalized sense arrives as a translation of the French siècle des Lumières ('century of lights') and the German Aufklärung, both coined by the thinkers themselves, who liked to picture reason as a lamp cutting through the fog of superstition. So the name isn't a later historian's label — it's the movement's own flattering self-portrait, which later critics and comedians have been needling ever since.