Jean Calvin was a French theologian and minister and one of the most important and influential advocates for Reformation in the generation after Martin Luther. Calvin was not trained as a theologian or minister. His initial publications were philological and reflect his legal education as well as the influence of Desiderius Erasmus and other humanists who imagined their work in opposition to the “scholasticism” of the universities and the innovations and corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church. Calvin made his most thorough and enduring contributions to Reformation at Geneva, where he lived (save for an exile in Strasbourg from 1538 to 1541) from 1536 until his death in 1564. And while his 1559 Institutio Christianae Religionis may serve as the most complete introduction to his theology, he often offers his most detailed treatments of topics in his commentaries, sermons, responses to adversaries, and local interventions in Geneva. For instance, in Geneva Calvin backed the creation of a consistory of ministers and elders that would mete out discipline in ecclesiastical matters. Depending upon the scope and definition of “ecclesiastical matters,” such a consistory could readily challenge the authority of civil magistrates or competing congregations.

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.

Fortitude (fortitudo) is the affective disposition that accompanies virtue. Spinoza defines affects as “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, ideas of these affections” (E3def3). Affects express changes, for better or for worse, in our body’s power.

Panpsychism is the view that mentality is pervasive: each thing exhibits psychological features. On some versions of panpsychism, each thing has perceptions; on other versions, each thing has experiences or is conscious. In seeing mentality as extending much more broadly than we might ordinarily think, the panpsychist needs to provide a powerful argument for this position, and throughout the history of philosophy up to the present day, certain philosophers – no doubt, a minority – have tried to do precisely that. Among Spinoza’s rough contemporaries, Cavendish, Conway, and Leibniz among others belong to this minority. Spinoza is often regarded – though, as we will see, not without controversy – as falling into this category too, and the arguments for panpsychism that have been attributed to him are continuous with some of the most important arguments that philosophers nowadays employ to support panpsychist views.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter: the PSR) is the principle according to which each thing that exists – or each fact that obtains – has an explanation. A commitment to some form of the PSR is one way to define what it is to be a rationalist.

In his Physics, Aristotle distinguishes between four different kinds of causes (aitia): material, formal, efficient, and final. Especially as articulated in later commentary, paradigmatic examples of material and formal causality include the contributions of “prime matter” and “substantial form” to the composition of a hylomorphic material substance. The efficient cause is something distinct in reality from the effect it produces, whereas the final cause is that for the sake of which the effect is produced.

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) was a poet firmly embedded in tradition, not a radical innovator but always aware of his predecessors and alert to ways of adapting and improving the models they provided. The exception that proves the rule is the Onegin stanza, the only instance in all of Pushkin’s oeuvre where he created his own stanzaic form. He did so for his unprecedented ‘novel in verse’ Eugene Onegin (Evgenii Onegin), widely considered the cornerstone of the Russian literary tradition. Composed from 1823 to 1831 and published serially between 1825 and 1832, the work is marked by sudden shifts in theme, character, setting, and mood.

Translated Byzantine lives of saints occupied considerable space in the hagiographic corpus of Rus and medieval Russia. But original (non-translated) vitae differ significantly from their Greek models in several respects: the very causes of their subjects’ sanctity (the Rus corpus emphasises saintly princes and founders of monasteries); their extremes of self-mortification (as in the case of Varlaam of Keret); and the extravagance of their feats (such as those of Andrew of Crete, or Petr and Fevroniia). Compared to Byzantine hagiography, the Lives of holy fools are overrepresented in the repertoire of medieval Rus, while female saints are underrepresented in it. In the modern era, Russian literature has drawn heavily on the medieval vitae. This tradition became pronounced in the mid-nineteenth century, but communist writers of the twentieth century also fashioned their heroes in the hagiographic mould.