Angels in the Early Modern World (review)

The essays in this splendid collection make a persuasive case for the importance of angelology in early modern history. The subjects treated range from Renaissance Neoplatonic magic to the modern disenchantment of the world, with plenty of consideration of the place of angels in the polemics of a religiously divided Europe. The geographical compass of the articles spans not just England, Ireland, and the Continent, but also New Spain and New England.

Perhaps the central lesson here is how complicated early modern thinking about angels was. On one level, beliefs about angels represented a dividing wedge between Protestants and Catholics, with Protestants deriding Catholic veneration of angels. Still, Protestant thinking about angels was deeply ambivalent, a point emphasized in Philip Soergel's treatment of "Luther on the Angels," as well as in Joad Raymond's consideration of the seemingly heretical descriptions of angels in Milton's Paradise Lost. Angels, after all, appeared in scripture; and, while some Protestant writers were willing also to concede, with Catholics, that individuals were assigned guardian angels or that angels attended the dying soul, others were more circumspect. The essays of Peter Marshall ("Angels around the Deathbed") and Alexandra Walsham ("Angels and Idols in England's Long Reformation") make clear the wide range of English Protestant thought about angels. Even those Protestants who believed that the age of angelic apparitions to humans had not — like the age of miracles — ceased could worry that such visions were in fact demonic. Thus, Elizabeth Reis ("Otherworldly Visions") offers a number of examples of women whose visitations by angels were distrusted by New England Puritan divines. And in seventeenth-century Ireland, as Raymond Gillespie shows, Protestant observers wrestled with the question of whether angelic assistance had saved the life of the infant son of a Church of Ireland minister.

For Catholics, the veneration of angels was one way to affirm a distinct religious identity. Not simply did Catholics herald the Archangel Michael as a sign of triumph over heresy, but also, as Trevor Johnson demonstrates, promotion of the cult of guardian angels was an important part of Counter-Reformation proselytizing. Jesuits frequently wrote about guardian angels and popularized their veneration. As Fernando Cervantes shows, early Franciscan missionaries in New Spain also made frequent reference to angels, a reminder that humans, their fellow creatures, were also more than just flesh and blood. In promoting devotion to angels, missionaries often described angels as birds, perhaps in accommodation of Nahua traditions about the afterlife. On both sides of the Atlantic, Catholic devotion stressed the constant combat between angels and demons in this world. When the Aragonese monk Blasco Lanuza penned a treatise on guardian angels in 1652, as María Tausiet argues, it was with an eye to "Lutherans, Calvinists and atheists" (238) across the nearby French border.

If early modern discussions of angels most obviously were related to religious debates, several essays in the volume also show the relevance of angels to magic, witchcraft, and the new mechanical philosophy. Robin Briggs's superb chapter, "Dubious Messengers: Bodin's Daemon, the Spirit World and the Sadducees," details several cases of authors who used, not claims of angelic visitations, but rather the evidence of witches and demoniacs to prove the real existence of the spirit world against materialist challenges. Similarly, in María Tausiet's "Patronage of Angels and Combat of Demons," Blasco Lanuza interpreted a spectacular epidemic of demonic possession in two Pyrenees villages as God's way of demonstrating the power of Catholic exorcists. As Bruce Gordon's essay reminds us, Renaissance Neoplatonic magic — along with the theology of Nicholas Cusa — proposed that humans could triumph over angels. Owen Davies traces the popularization of such Renaissance angelic magic texts in seventeenth-century England, despite claims that angel-worship was popish.

The new mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century did not cause a disenchantment of the angelic world, as several essays note. Davies, for...