Seemingly an appeal to simple, shared humanity, humanism has proved over the last two hundred years one of the most contentious and divisive of concepts. It has provoked a succession of bitter altercations and engages with some of the profoundest themes - religious, sexual, political - of modern life and thought. Starting with the nineteenth century educationalists and historians, Tony Davies's study traces the emergence of the figure of 'Man' in the writings of the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the free-thinkers and philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth. He explores the issues at stake in the bruising encounters between humanism and a succession of intransigent antihumanisms. Humanism is an essential guide to one of the key concepts in cultural and literary thought.