Was he a medieval writer or Renaissance writer? I'm getting conflicting answers, and I don't understand history

Was he a medieval writer or Renaissance writer? I'm getting conflicting answers, and I don't understand history.

It depends upon when you consider the end of the Medieval period and the beginning of the Renaissance to be, and that's all.

Medieval.

Why don't they just standardize the dates of these periods like they have for earlier periods, like the Jurassic Period?

Because such large, broad human historical categories are fuzzy and complex and cannot accurately be reduced and crystallized into simple date ranges, or if you insist on doing this, then you are actually guilty of the problem of "reductionism", which is where you simplify things away just because you want to keep things simple, at the expense of the truth. And I say this as a person who normally is unconcerned about "reductionism" and who normally views the use of that epithet with skepticism that it is being used by leftists to artfully dismiss a line of analysis which actually is true without engaging the content of its ideas.

Something like the dinosaur days can popularly be represented as such-and-such long-irrelevant date range without offending human sensibilities. And if we find new evidence to revise, fine. Anything to do with human history is naturally a touchier subject because people actually care about such things.

Medieval, helping to bring on the renaissance.

In general, Dante's age (the 13th/14th c) do seem to be at the crux of what we generally understand as "the late medival" period, going into something like "the early renaissance" days. His situation in Italy helps the general association with the Renaissance, which is closely bound up with Italy: da Vinci, Michelangelo, Cardano, Machiavelli, and so on and so forth.

Giotto's own naive paintings are commonly understood as "early Renaissance". Giotto was an exact contemporary of Dante's, although living an extra 15 years or so.

An earlier mathematical figure, Fibonacci, is a bit older than these two, and he and his best known work, just a few decades before, are called "late-middle-age" stuff.

This is really the fuzzy borderline between the two historical categories, this c. 1200AD period.

fucking anglos

Definitely medieval. Even Hans Baron thought he was a medieval thinker, and subsequent scholars pushed Baron's Renaissance "episteme" even further forward, leaving Dante even more medieval.

He thinks Caesar was a good king, so he's not a republican. His support of the Ghibelline anti-papal faction is the result of traditional medieval rivalries ousting the Ghibelline Whites from Florence, and hinges on the Emperor being a Caesar-like "good king." His ethics are completely Christian and feudal, renouncing the material world as basically meaningless and irredeemably evil, to retreat inward and cultivate one's relationship with virtue and God, not any kind of civic duty.

If Petrarch was still medieval, then Dante certainly was.

The few times I have looked at Dante in university it has always been taught in this way. The "page flip" between late Medieval and early Renaissance writing and thought was how one of my professors put it. Socio-politically/philosophically it falls short of some of the common Renaissance themes, while other elements can be arguably viewed as precursors to ideas that became popular during the renaissance.

I remember analyzing one of the passages of Inferno because it flipped between humanistic and scholastic sentiment, almost as if both "newer" (to the west) and classic ideas were being weighed up even though Dante was writing during the height of High Scholasticism.