 Next to Thomasius and Wolff, the most important intellectual figure in the early history of the Friedrichs-Universität in Halle was August Hermann Francke (1663–1723). As we have seen, Francke had courted controversy in Leipzig through his involvement in the Pietist movement. Pietism was a spiritual movement within the Lutheran tradition that rejected the scholastic and theological turn that Lutheranism had taken and proposed a further, internal reformation to supplement the already-effected external one, and aimed at cultivating a “living faith” rather than mere lip-service to Christian ideals. The Pietists sought the personal and interior experience of a relationship to Christ, an individual transformation that was the result of an act of divine grace modelled on Francke’s own conversion experience (cf. Wallmann 1990: 63–4). To this end, the Pietists focused on the study of the Bible itself and devotional literature in small groups—the so-called conventicles or collegia pietatis—which were notable, and controversial, for welcoming the involvement of women (R. Albrecht 2004; Gierl 2015).