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The publication of Human, All Too Human constituted Nietzsche’s declaration of independence as an author, thinker, and human being. In this work Nietzsche separated himself from his youthful guiding lights (the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the composer Richard Wagner) by establishing his own ideal of the “Free Spirit". But after Nietzsche published the first installment of Human, All Too Human, he added two further installments, and his understanding of what it would take to live as a Free Spirit evolved in the process. In the last of the those installments, The Wanderer and His Shadow, the challenges or limitations of the Free Spirit project become especially evident. Nietzsche shows that the Free Spirit’s admirable independence has to be attained through the adoption of an austere self-discipline (involving what Nietzsche characterizes as a restraining or quieting of the heart) that leaves one cut off from attractive and authentic goods characteristic of wholehearted attachment to broader human community. This chapter also shows that Nietzsche’s reflections in The Wanderer were particularly influenced by his discovery of Xenophon’s Socrates, as an alternative to the more famous Platonic portrait.

In Nietzsche's late autobiographical writings he shows that the two major turning-points of his career - Human, All Too Human (which established his ideal of the Free Spirit) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (whose protagonist goes beyond the ideal of the Free Spirit) - amount to to turning points in his thought because they reflect turning points in his life, involving, above all, changes in his health around the time that he wrote each text. Nietzsche's self-account has the following structure: good health is associated with forgetting of oneself (a process that can be seen at work in and through Thus Spoke Zarathustra), while ill health is associated with returning to oneself (a process that can be seen at work in and through Human, All Too Human). And the major lesson of the autobiographical writings proves to be not the superiority of Zarathustra to the Free Spirits, or vice versa, but, instead, the necessity of each for Nietzsche as tools in a process of examining and enriching his self-understanding ever-more-deeply.

This chapter focuses on Walter Hilton, England's mystic theologian. Walter Hilton is regarded as the actual theologian of English mysticism. His intellectual and literary activity belongs to the last quarter of the fourteenth century. This chapter considers some of Hilton's English works, which include the two-part Scale of Perfection, Of Angels' Song, Mixed Life, and Eight Chapters on Perfection. It then discusses Hilton's Latin texts, such as De imagine peccati (On the image of sin) and Epistola de utilitate et prerogativis religionis. It also examines Hilton's view of contemplation, prayer, and meditation as well as what he actually means by the term “feelyng” in Scale of Perfection. Finally, it analyzes the reflection of the Free Spirit movement in Hilton, the The Cloud of Unknowing author, and Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls.

This chapter follows Nietzsche's path as he travels to Sorrento. It relates Meysenbug's passionate desire to help him recover his health and her organization of the journey as well as the stay. It explores in great detail Nietzsche's encounter with a young woman named Isabelle von der Pahlen on a night train in Italy, who claims, in her autobiography, to have coined the term "Free Spirit" in her conversation with Nietzsche on this occasion, as a preferable alternative to "freethinker." D'Iorio then leads us through the textual genesis, in Nietzsche's writings, of the notion of the Free Spirit, its connection to the idea of The Light Life (Das leichte Leben), and the meaning it comes to have in Things Human, All Too Human, as a term for one who lives and thinks differently from the way in which the determining factors of his socio-economic position would predict. The chapter ends with Nietzsche's arrival in Naples and his experience of release and connection to truth in the Southern landscape. D'Iorio quotes the phrase Nietzsche writes in his notebook, upon his arrival: "I have enough spirit for the South."

The chapter traces the reaction of Heinrich Seuse to the condemnation of Meister Eckhart's teachings as heretical in 1329. Inquisitorial procedure as it developed after 1215 is presented, showing the structural disregard for the sense of spiritual vocation which informs the vita apostolica. Seuse's response is to develop forms of self-monitoring which pre-empt the controlling structures of the ecclesiastical authorities. The result is the development of techniques of self-control, and an associated vocabulary, that prefigure modern forms of identity. A reading of Seuse's autobiography written in part in the form of a dialogue with the Dominican nun Elsbeth Stagel shows the effect of these new structures on the spiritual symbiosis discussed in Chapter 6. The woman's own experience is replaced by the controlling structures of the male cleric creating a dynamic like that criticized by Irigaray in which the terms of woman's spiritual life are either dictated by clerical discourse or are experienced as threateningly unintelligible. Forms which prefigure modern habits of identity are shown to be practices for regulating human togetherness and the longing to “become God”.

The first major period of climate shock to be studied was the early fourteenth century, especially the years between 1310 and 1325. This involved a broad and lasting era of climatic change, a time of global cooling that marked the onset of the so-called Little Ice Age. Societies around the world suffered times of shocking paranoia and conspiracy-mongering. They responded with persecutions of minorities and dissidents, leading to purges and expulsions on an appalling scale. Whole populations suffered bitter times of exile and diaspora, and those changes did much to create our familiar maps of the great faiths and their geographical concentrations. In Europe, modern ideas of witchcraft were born.