ABSTRACT
The humanist tradition places its honorees in a dual light: they are exalted both as panhuman geniuses and as national heroes. This chapter explores in greater depth certain assumptions about commemorating creators that European countries share with one another in contrast to the United States. In keeping with humanist beliefs that have flourished since the fourteenth century, Europeans adulate creative geniuses. Each year's celebrands form links in a Golden Chain of Genius that connects the 1990s with generations who have honored the same figures stretching back to Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in the 1300s. The cult of anniversaries renews the humanist chain with a fresh round of honorees each year. The cult of anniversaries, with its emphasis on promoting national or local identity and on sustaining courtly traditions amid a commemoration industry, has no truck with mystical thinkers. The humanist tradition asks that a creator have produced works that delight sensibility or enlarge wisdom.
