Chapter 6 traces how, in the aftermath of these reforms, the Neogranadian church, at the parish level, became an Indigenous and grassroots organisation. One aspect of this transformation was institutional, as it came to be better staffed, organised, and equipped. Another was ideological, as the lessons of the Jesuit experiments with missionary methods were extended across the archdiocese, centring everyday practice, popular devotion, and social institutions. But the most significant aspect was led by Indigenous people themselves, as the shift away from punitive policies and towards a more inclusive Christianisation, coupled with the implementation of a more effective language policy, created space and opportunities for people in rural parishes to interact with Christianity in new ways. This went much further than the authorities had intended, as they learned when they sought to rein in some of these changes, and it transformed the New Kingdom of Granada forever.

The conclusion reflects on the profound transformations undergone by the New Kingdom of Granada by the late seventeenth century, and how this began to powerfully shape the images of the early colonial past that began to appear in works of historical writing in that period, with long-lasting consequences. This triumphal register of writing, that cast the Muisca as the third great empire of the Americas and asserted the swift success of the Spanish colonial administration, has long obscured perceptions about the Indigenous people of highland New Granada. As this book has demonstrated, a granular exploration of an exhaustive array of colonial archival sources paints a very different picture: on the one hand, of the anxieties and limitations at the heart of the colonial project, the incomplete and contingent nature of colonial power, and of deep and multi-layered crises of governance; and on the other, of the complex ways in which Indigenous people, in their interaction with Christianity, made possible the coming of the New Kingdom of Granada.

Chapter 4 focuses on the early seventeenth century, when religious policy in the kingdom came to be in the hands of a determined new Audiencia president, an ambitious archbishop, and a radical group of Jesuits. With the support of a broad coalition of the kingdom’s leading settlers, these reformers took Christianisation in a new direction. The reformers focused on the promotion of the regular and frequent participation in a range of quotidian Catholic practices and institutions that their sixteenth-century predecessors had generally discouraged or withheld from Indigenous people, particularly private devotions, popular celebrations, confraternities, and public ceremony. This began in a handful of parishes entrusted to these Jesuit reformers, who had a very particular understanding of the role of ‘external’ manifestations of piety, and who used these sites as testing grounds for new approaches to Christianisation. These ultimately had the effect of affording Indigenous people space and opportunities to engage with Christianity in new – if, for the reformers, not always desirable – ways, laying the foundations for the reformation of the kingdom.

The introduction reflects on the peculiar position of the New Kingdom of Granada, and the nature of colonial and scholarly writing about the region, which both developed under the shadow of the centres of Spanish colonial power in America, Mexico and Peru, showing how the expectations, assumptions, and perspectives of better studied regions have distorted our understanding of this region’s history. It outlines the book’s principal methodological arguments: the importance of an exhaustive and granular approach to colonial sources that takes into account the intellectual, institutional, and normative circumstances of their creation and transmission as a methodological imperative; the need to centre Christianisation, and the relentless challenges it posed, to understand the construction of colonial rule in the New Kingdom; and the need to overcome antiquated and counterproductive approaches to the study of religious change among Indigenous people, and instead focus on their diverse, contradictory, and complex interactions with Christianity.

The introduction outlines the arrangement of the book, explains the comparative method and the selection of the case studies, and comments on the primary sources.

The book is devoted to the relationships between Nicene and Homoian Christianities in the context of broader religious and social changes in post-Roman societies from the end of the fourth to the seventh century. The main analytical and interpretative tools used in this study are religious conversion and ecclesiastical competition. It examines sources discussing Nicene–Homoian encounters in Vandal Africa, Gothic and Lombard Italy, Gaul, and Hispania – regions where the polities of the Goths, Suevi, Burgundians, and Franks emerged. It explores the extent to which these encounters were shaped by various religious policies and political decisions rooted in narratives of conversion and confessional rivalry. Through this analysis, the aim is to offer a nuanced interpretation of how Christians in the successor kingdoms handled religious dissent and how these actions manifested in social practices.

The Introduction presents the main topic of the book – the role of conversion and competition between Nicene and Homoian churches in the post-Roman West – and the methods applied. It explains terminology (Nicene, Homoian), theorises the concept of conversion as a tool of historical analysis, and presents the purpose of the cross-regional comparison that follows.

Building on their training and contacts, Iberian men of letters such as Nogueira widened their intellectual horizons. Amid a period of relative peace known as the Pax Hispánica (1601–1621), the expertise of such figures in historical writing was solicited by members of the Republic of Letters interested in Iberian matters. Such intellectual correspondences gave way to debates on politics of conversion and tolerance and the relationship between royal and ecclesiastical power. In the meantime, someone like Nogueira specialized in historical matters and became a source of information for foreign intellectuals who worked on behalf of French, Italian, English, and other powers. This process of specialization fueled the critical political sense of Nogueira while bringing him increasing attention from admirers and critics. At the core of his self-fashioning strategy, Nogueira’s library became a proxy by which he and his critics came to define his status as a mercenary of knowledge. As this status started to become more evident, so too did a strengthening sense of belonging to a mercenary republic.

This chapter demonstrates that when King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and latterly Oliver Cromwell ruled in England the word conquest involved the deliberate slaying of many inhabitants in the area being subjected to conquest, and the taking of measures to ensure that the survivors would abandon their identity to become English and Protestant. This means that when the English government undertook to conquer Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s and again in the 1650s, it was launching campaigns that, by modern definitions, were genocidal in intent. The author shows that this reality was acknowledged by historians of Ireland, regardless of their religious and political allegiances to the close of the nineteenth century even if the terms they used a different vocabulary. The chapter then proceeds to explain why academic authors in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century chose to discount these gory aspects of Ireland’s early modern past , and how the older verities have been rehabilitated to recent decades. The author throughout draws a distinction between the many massacres that occurred in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the attempted conquests, with associated intended genocides, of which there were but two.

Statistical models of processes where random events have an effect on partly random subsequent events are covered in this chapter. The sequence of eruptions of the geyser Old Faithful is taken as a simple example to illustrate Markov Chains. Infectious disease models are then covered and the history of various attempts at modelling them from the early twentieth century onwards is covered. Modelling religious conversion as a stochastic process is treated briefly.

This chapter concerns the life-histories of lingua francas, languages adopted for communication among speakers who do not otherwise share a language. It recognizes four principal motives for developing a lingua franca: commerce, conquest, religious conversion, and cultural attraction. A lingua franca depends for its survival on the continuation in force of one or other of these motives, unless some user population adopts it as a mother-tongue, passing it on in the home, or dropping it for one purpose only to take it up afresh for another: this is Regeneration. Other paths, for decline of a lingua franca, include Ruin or Resignation, if the user community dissolves, and Relegation, if the use of the language is deliberately banned. In this framework, the careers of major languages (excluding European empires) are narrated: Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek in West Asia; Greek (again) and Latin in the Mediterranean and Europe; the sprouting and interaction of languages before European conquests in the Americas, and in Africa; Sanskrit, Persian, and later Malay in Southeast Asia, the interplay of Putonghua with other Chinese dialects across East Asia; and the rise of Hindi-Urdu in South Asia.

In 1991, I argued that, “The Puritan patrimony has exacted a heavy toll on men, a fact borne out by our present ‘crisis in masculinity,’” which second wave feminists identified as the existence of “a rape culture” in the United States. A contributing factor was the narrative of religious conversion innovated by early New England Puritanism, which required believers to become spiritual “brides of Christ” in order to be saved. This devotional rhetoric not only colored Puritan poetry but indicated deeply held attitudes about spirituality, embodied gender, and social power, which shaped subsequent US poetry. In this chapter, I revisit and update these claims in the light of trans theory, reread poetry on spiritual gender by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, early New England’s two major poets; and conclude with a discussion of Emily Dickinson, who was raised in a Puritan culture but makes irreverent, even subversive, use of this legacy.