Conversations with Angels : Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100-1700

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. Edited By Joad Raymond. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction....Pages 1-21 Front Matter....Pages 23-23 Strategies of Interspecies Communication, 1100–2000....Pages 25-48 Angels and the Physics of Place in the Early Fourteenth Century....Pages 49-66 Galileian Angels....Pages 67-89 Newtonian Angels....Pages 90-122 Front Matter....Pages 123-123 Speaking with Spirits in Medieval Magic Texts....Pages 125-149 False Illuding Spirits & Cownterfeiting Deuills: John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and Religious Anxiety....Pages 150-174 ‘Behold, the dreamer cometh’: Hyperphysical Magic and Deific Visions in an Early-Modern Theosophical Lab-Oratory....Pages 175-200 Front Matter....Pages 201-201 Singing with the Angels: Hildegard of Bingen’s Representations of Celestial Music....Pages 203-229 ‘And the angel said...’: Conversations with Angels in Early Modern Music....Pages 230-249 Athanasius Kircher’s Guardian Angel....Pages 250-270 Front Matter....Pages 271-271 Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in Early Modern England....Pages 273-294 The Guardian Angel in Protestant England....Pages 295-316 Radicalism and Mysticism in the Later Seventeenth Century: John Pordage’s Angels....Pages 317-339 Back Matter....Pages 341-349 "This collection offers a new and compelling vision of the place of angels in medieval and early-modern Europe. Through literal and figurative conversations with angels, humans acquired or imagined new forms of knowledge and new understandings of the relationship between God and man and of the arrangement of the natural world. By looking at these conversations, the authors, from many disciplines, recover lost perspectives on the social and cultural histories of theology, magic, natural philosophy, music, and literature in medieval and early modern Europe. The essays explore points of convergence between the disciplines and between medieval and Renaissance theology, natural philosophy, politics and imaginative culture. They restore to angels some of the intellectual vitality and cultural substance that the centuries have taken away, and bring angels closer to humans"--Provided by publisher