Angels were at the centre of the two great days in the agrarian calendar, Michaelmas and the feast of the Annunciation, otherwise known as Lady Day, when rents were due. Whatever one's beliefs, on this score at least, angels were impossible to ignore. Laura Sangha's focus, however, is on belief and, noting the ubiquity of belief about angels, she approaches the subject from Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of a framework of fields of ‘cultural production’ through which angels can be understood as a cultural motif adapting to and reflecting the interests of the society creating it. The timescale allows her to consider not only the immediate impact of the Reformation changes but also the ways in which understandings changed during the two centuries now often referred to as encapsulating the ‘Long Reformation’ and, by doing so, to interrogate the question of secularisation. The scriptural foundations of angels made them acceptable to Protestant understanding; though their intercessory role was abandoned, they appeared in providential guise as messengers (bearers of omens), protectors and helpers. Nevertheless, throughout the period, the, to Protestants, ‘idolatrous’ devotions with which angels had been traditionally associated always left a sense of suspicion about the legitimacy of angels, especially as Catholics, and in particular the Jesuits, developed a vigorous intercessory role for angels in a Church which felt itself to be persecuted and often had to subsist without the support of priests or sacraments. Protestants of all shades did, however, create new understandings; those of Paradise lost are well known to us, and it is no surprise to find the Arminians drawn to these celestial beings, and to these this study adds much valuable material from the Restoration Church, from men like Thomas Ken, who included many references to angels in the prayers that he produce for Winchester College, to Richard Baxter, who enjoined the faithful for ‘that Protection which the Lord giveth thee by these’. Support was not universaL however, and for Quakers such as Francis Howgill ‘their Ministrations are to give way unto Christ’. At a popular level orthodox views coexisted with older traditions, and the notion of the guardian angel, particular to each individual, persisted, though an interesting absence of references to them in the surviving ballad collections in suggestive of a more sceptical understanding. Their ubiquity, noticed by the author, is also explained by the role which angels traditionally played, and continued to play in the popular imagination, around the deathbed, that common haunt of humanity. As memorial monuments and funeral orations demonstrated, angels were often part of the inescapable journey from this world to the next, and their images proliferated. It is a shame that, given the richness of the iconographical evidence (and the price of the book), the publishers could find no room for illustrations. The volume retains some of the features of the thesis from which it emerged, and could have benefitted from some pruning, but it makes a valuable contribution in reminding us of the good angels which inhabited the imaginations of early modern England, as opposed to those demonic fallen ones which contemporaries worried over and which historians have focused so much attention upon. More generally it also establishes the case for angels as ‘one of the traditional constituents of faith’.