 It should be emphasized that Lipsius did not seek to develop a new philosophy but rather wanted to produce a better “understanding of Seneca.” Nevertheless, it has been claimed that his elucidation of Stoicism gave new meaning to concepts such as freedom, determination, nature and reason, providence and God, and provided European intellectuals with a new awareness of the world, rationality, free will and individuality. It is well known that Lipsian Neostoicism had a direct influence on many seventeenth-century writers — Guillaume du Vair, Montesquieu, Bishop Bossuet and Pierry Bayle in France; Francis Bacon and Joseph Hall in England; and Francisco de Quevedo and Juan de Vera y Figueroa in Spain, to name but a few. One could go further and say that no mention of Stoicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was complete without a reference to Lipsius’s Manuductio, which became the classic work on Stoicism for a century and a half. The most important histories of philosophy — e.g., those by Georgius Hornius (1620–1670), Thomas Stanley (1625–1678), Gerardus Johannes Vossius (1577–1649), Joannes Jonsius (1624–1659), Henning Witte (1634–1696), Johannes Franciscus Buddeus (1667–1729), Burckhard Gotthelf Struve (1671–1738),Christoph August Heumann (1681–1764) or Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770) — all cite Lipsius’s historical and philosophical introductions to Stoic physics and morals. His two systematic treatises on Stoic philosophy, “pleading its cause before the court of Christianity” (Spanneut, 239), found a prominent place in the library of Spinoza and of other major philosophers of the early modern era, including Descartes and Leibniz; and it was from Lipsius that Locke first learned about Roman Stoicism.