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 1 explores the contours of the religious practices of the Muisca in the early decades after the European invasion. To do so it unravels a series of overlapping assumptions and stereotypes about the functioning of their religious practices, social organisation, and political economy. While much of the historiography continues to take for granted that these people constituted a pagan laity led in the worship of a transcendental religion by a hierarchy of priests who performed sacrifices in temples, this chapter shows that these long-held narratives are fictions originating in the earliest descriptions of the region, later embellished and developed by seventeenth-century chroniclers. Instead, drawing a large corpus of colonial observations, it reveals a highly localised series of immanentist religous practices, centred on the maintenance of lineage deities that Spaniards called santuarios and a sophisticated ritual economy of reciprocal exchange, that were intimately connected to the workings of political power and economic production.

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.

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.

Continuing the volume’s fourth thematic strand (Cultural Perspectives), this chapter studies the writing of history and memory in the age of William the Conqueror. After a discussion of Normandy’s first dynastic chronicle composed by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, it directs its focus onto monastic historical narratives produced in Normandy, England, and their neighbouring territories, before turning to a range of contemporary secular narratives. The chapter is rounded off with considerations of Anglo-Norman historical writing in the broader context of north-western Europe and its transmission in manuscripts.

This chapter considers the relationship between change and continuity in the English Reformations through a close study of historical writing. It situates Protestant historical writing during the Tudor Reformations in its polemical context: the need to defend Protestantism from charges of novelty and heresy, and explain away the apparent glory of the Catholic Church over the previous 1,500 years, which were captured in the phrase, ‘Where was your Church before Luther?’ It shows that in answering that question, Protestant writers used traditional practices and modes of historical writing – apocalypticism, providence and prophesy – and employed traditional media (ballads and prophetic images) alongside the new technology of print. It argues that this apparent continuity with the medieval past was vital to Protestant experience and expression of the Reformations as a jolt to historical consciousness. Because they were teleological, these types of historical writing defined the Reformation as a seismic and defining change in history: the last days which would see the culmination of human history and the purification of the Church. Articulating the importance of the presence necessitated the past being remembered and redefined. In this way, memory was crucial to the process of Reformation.

This chapter explores how classical ideas of the gift were utilised by medieval writers. The chapter focuses on three particularly influential writers from medieval England active across a range of genres: John of Salisbury, William of Malmesbury and Matthew Paris. The chapter shows that these writers were highly familiar with classical ideas of the gift and drew extensively upon them in shaping their own writings.