Angelology, broadly construed to incorporate the study of both good and evil spirits, played an important role in the intellectual and cultural life of early modern Europe. To date, however, historians have focused more on the dark side of the spiritual realm, perhaps because of the popularity of witchcraft studies over the past several decades. Beneficent angels, it would seem, are due for a reassessment, and Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham's edited volume, Angels in the Early Modern World, is a step in this direction. A brief glance at the table of contents confirms the fertility of this research agenda; the essays compiled here treat an impressively wide range of issues: the occult sciences of the Renaissance, Reformation theology, mortuary culture, European colonialism, witchcraft, early modern theories of language and literature, gender, and popular culture. Since it is impossible in a short review to do justice to such a broad array of topics, I will instead focus on a pair of themes that seem to run through many of the chapters.

First, as would be expected in a volume dealing with the early modern period, the Reformation looms large. Angels, on the one hand, aroused Protestant suspicions because they functioned as mediators between man and God, and for some reformers their adoration was reminiscent of the cult of the saints. On the other hand, however, angels were undeniably scriptural and thus could not be merely dismissed as Catholic inventions. Given the ambiguous status of angels, analyzing attitudes toward them can provide hints about continuity and change in the Reformation era and contribute to a more nuanced account of confessional contrasts. In Philip Soergels’s essay, “Luther on the Angels,” for example, Luther's reformed angelology treads a fine line between respecting a popular need for direct contact with the numinous and doctrinal imperatives that militated against some of the more extravagant aspects of late medieval angelology.

In a similar vein, essays by Marshall and Walsham examine Protestant theory and practice concerning angels as a way of gauging the vicissitudes of confessionalization. Marshall, in his chapter on the role of angels in the Protestant theology of death, charts the subtle dynamic through which the Catholic ars moriendi was transmuted into a distinctly Protestant mortuary culture. Although Protestants borrowed liberally from Catholic handbooks on death and dying, they adopted conscious exegetical strategies in the interest of conforming to reformed teachings. Take, for example, the story of the angels bearing Lazarus's soul to the bosom of Abraham. Whereas medieval theologians had equated Abraham's bosom with purgatory, Protestants insisted that it represented heaven, thus striking a blow against a doctrine they found particularly objectionable.

Pictorial representation of angels also spawned a good deal of contention, as Walsham demonstrates in her chapter on the English Reformation. Because of Protestant anxieties regarding idolatry, the depiction of angels in ecclesiastical art was a highly charged issue, not only between Protestants and Catholics but within Protestantism as well. Disputes between Anglicans and Puritans during the English Civil War, for example, sometimes erupted into violent episodes of iconoclasm in which images of angels on church facades and in stained-glass windows were destroyed. Despite these midcentury convulsions, however, images of angels continued to factor prominently in the decorative art of churches throughout England. The ambivalent angelology reflected by the English case is in Walsham's view an indication of “the cautious and incomplete character of the English Reformation, and of the ongoing theological, liturgical and cultural quarrels that were its most enduring legacy” (167).

Although Protestants had an obvious motivation for revising traditional teachings about angels, Catholic angelology was neither static nor merely reactionary during the early modern period. Fernando Cervantes's essay on the efforts of mendicant missionaries to evangelize indigenous peoples in Mexico, for instance, describes efforts by the friars to identify angels with tropical birds—creatures that, conveniently, already populated Nahua visions of the afterlife. As documented in pieces by Trevor Johnson, Raymond Gillespie, and María Tausiet, a renewed emphasis on guardian angels in post-Tridentine theological treatises and catechisms seems to have been another way in which Catholics adapted their angelology to early modern circumstances.

For both Catholics and Protestants alike, distinguishing between beneficent angels and demons was a crucially important task, and one complicated by the ability of the devil to transform himself into “an angel of light” (as described in 2 Cor. 11:14). Tausiet's essay on demonic possession in seventeenth-century Spain and Elizabeth Reis's study of religious enthusiasm in Colonial New England highlight this epistemological quandary. Significantly, in both pieces women are the ones who are subject to the discernment of their male superiors, bringing an inescapable gender dimension to the analysis of spirit possession.

A second prominent theme in this collection concerns the relationship between angels and early modern science. Early modern science (or, to be more precise, “natural philosophy”) differed dramatically from our own post-Enlightenment paradigm. In a world full of occult sympathies and antipathies, “natural magic”—that is, the study and manipulation of these forces—was a legitimate scientific pursuit, as was the study of angels. Because angels were created by God, they were subject to the laws of the natural world, but the question of how such spiritual beings interacted with the rest of the material creation long perplexed Christian thinkers and gave rise to a cottage industry of scholastic speculation during the Middle Ages. In the early modern period, as new ideas about nature (and the place of humans within it) proliferated, so too did novel theories of angelic action. Numerous examples of this early modern reengagement with angelology can be found in Bruce Gordon's essay, “The Renaissance Angel,” in which he describes the efforts of Renaissance humanists to integrate Neoplatonism and Hermetic magic with traditional Christian teachings on angels. Gordon's chapter resonates with recent studies of the Scientific Revolution that have shown that analyses of the spirit world and the natural world were not antithetical but, rather, parallel discourses that often reinforced each other in unexpected ways. Variations on this theme appear in chapters by Owen Davies, Joad Raymond, and Robin Briggs—and in Marshall and Walsham's excellent introduction to the book.

It is difficult to thoroughly convey the rich detail and sophisticated argumentation that characterizes this superb collection. It should appeal to scholars across a wide range of disciplines and lay the groundwork for future study.