Not many people today would say that the terms humanism and nationalism make a good match. Quite the opposite, most would think that the two words completely contradict each another. Such a judgement seems correct, if we take the general understanding of humanism as a benchmark. In recent decades, ‘humanism’ and ‘humanist’ have become positively associated with a wide variety of ideas and actions linked to the promotion of human welfare, to the affirmation of human dignity or to the belief in the human capacity for self-improvement through education. Thanks to such fuzzy semantics, candidates for the honorary title of humanist can be taken from a diverse pool of people, including humanitarian aid workers, elder statesmen and intellectuals. The only conditions these candidates usually have to meet are a public presence, an altruistic attitude – and an anti-nationalist stance. Indeed, the caricature of the self-absorbed, morally indifferent and boneheaded nationalist helps to define the modern-day humanist ex negativo, thereby compensating for the lack of a distinctive profile of their own.

From a historian’s point of view, the modern assimilation of humanism to humanitarianism and the fashioning of humanists as do-gooders and multiculturalists are not necessarily objectionable. They only become problematic when confused with the historiographical term of ‘Renaissance humanism’. Unfortunately this happens all too often because modern defenders of ‘humanist’ values like to refer to a genealogy of great minds, whose intellectual legacy they claim to uphold. Among the ‘usual suspects’ they invoke are Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), Thomas More (1478–1535) and – above all – Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69–1536). In general, the pictures they paint of these Renaissance humanists are not entirely wrong; however, they tend to be very selective. What is lacking most is historical context.