The republican discourse of the Italian Renaissance is well known. To defend the community against faction and discord, the republican theorists argued – basing themselves on the works of Cicero, Livy and especially Sallust – that a free city needed to be a res publica. To guarantee the vivere libero, the city-state needed to create a constitutional framework such that the government reflected the res (the will of the community) and enhanced the publica (the general interest of the community) as a whole. Such a political community was, in republican discourse, best protected through government by law, by a mixed constitution and by the political virtue of its citizens.

By contrast, the political discourse in the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands remains largely unknown, with the one major and obvious exception of Erasmus. The political dimension of his thought is usually analysed together with the other key figure of Northern humanism, Thomas More. As has been argued by Quentin Skinner, John Guy and Brendan Bradshaw, there is a strong linguistic, conceptual and philosophical kinship between Erasmian humanism and the republicanism of the Italian renaissance (Bradshaw 1991; Guy 1993; Skinner 1987).