Description
Based on refractions of earlier beliefs, modern angels - at once terrible and comforting, frighteningly other and reassuringly beneficent - have acquired a powerful symbolic value. This interdisciplinary study looks at how humans conversed with angels in medieval and early modern Europe, and how they explained and represented these conversations.
Table of Contents
Introduction; J.Raymond PART I: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY Strategies of Interspecies Communication, 1100-2000; W.Stephens Angels and the Physics of Place in the Early Fourteenth Century; J.Byrne Galilean Angels; N.Wilding Newtonian Angels; S.Schaffer PART II: MAGIC Speaking with Spirits in Medieval Magic Texts; S.Page False Illuding Spirits & Cownterfeiting Deuills: John Dee's Angelic Conversations and Religious Anxiety; S.Clucas 'Behold, the dreamer cometh': Hyperphysical Magic and Deific Visions in an Early Modern Theosophical Lab-Oratory; P.J.Forshaw PART III: REPRESENTATION Singing with the Angels: Hildegard of Bingen's Representations of Celestial Music; W.Flynn 'And the angel said': Conversations with Angels in Early Modern Music; J.A.Owens Athanasius Kircher's Guardian Angel; I.Rowland PART IV: REFORMATIONS The Guardian Angel in Protestant England; P.Marshall Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in Early Modern England; A.Walsham Mysticism and Politics in C17th England: The Pordages and their Angelical World; J.Raymond
