This important collection of essays lives up to its title, both in time and space. The contributors consider texts from Nicolas of Cusa, writing in the mid-fifteenth century, and Jean Bodin, finishing with the works of Ebenezer Sibly and Francis Barrett published at the end of the eighteenth century, and the essays examine contemporary understandings of angels in Central Europe, the British Isles, Spain, the Americas, both North and South, and almost everywhere that the Jesuits left their footprints. For the most part the essays deal with elite understandings of the role allotted to angels in the scheme of salvation; Bruce Gordon takes us through Renaissance neo-Platonic thinkers such as Cusa, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and Philip Soergel demonstrates both Luther's scepticism about medieval hierarchical readings about ‘the orders of angels’ and his confidence in their continued purpose in the world, though after about 1530 this came increasingly to function around their role as protection against the devil, their fallen equivalent. This tension between good and evil spirits, and the difficulties of determining which was which, left Lutheranism with a divided legacy in which elite understandings sat uneasily alongside the popular devotion that arose around the visionary Anna Schutzin. Unsurprisingly angels were also found on the threshold between elite and popular culture within Catholicism, especially in the missionary world. Fernando Cervantes demonstrates in a lively essay that early mendicant engagement in angelology carried into Franciscan missionary strategy in central Mexico, each chapel of their convent of Huejotzingo being presided over by two large angels around a crest with either a Christological or Marian theme. These angels bore the instruments of the passion, and they were central to religious instruction. Unlike Luther's angels these were close to this world and legitimate objects of intercessory prayer, and their presence in the art and architecture of Franciscan Mexico is ubiquitous. The problem of syncretism eventually produced scepticism about the use of angels in missionary strategy, and a shift in focus towards the personal or ‘guardian angel’ in Franciscan mystical writing. By the seventeenth century the ‘guardian angel’ was a commonplace of Jesuit devotion, made popular by the posthumous publication in 1606 of the meditation on angels and guardian angels of the recently beatified Aloysius Gonzaga. Gonzaga had died young and it is as guides and guardians of youth that angels are depicted in the extensive visual culture that was produced on this subject in the years following 1650. By that date devotion to angels was a consistent feature of Jesuit proselytism, but as the late Trevor Johnson suggests in a characteristically sharp but modest conclusion, this was not merely a missionary strategy, but had its roots in theological controversy, between the Jesuits and the Dominicans (again) over grace and free will. Thus guardian angels are best understood as part of the post-Tridentine call to spiritual and moral activism, bringing the non-material world firmly down to earth.

If these guardian angels were close to humans this closeness was not shared by most Protestant writers. For Milton the exchanges between angels and humans were complicated and could be fraught, difficulties located in the distance between the species. That distance was nowhere more apparent than in angelic speech, a subject on which the Westminster Assembly pronounced and which is central to Paradise lost. In a closely argued essay Joad Raymond argues that Milton's angelic speech has a close association with sacred poetry, and that each engages with the epistemological concerns of the mid-seventeenth century, so that to ‘speak with the tongues of angels is to speak eloquently without feigning’, to speak what is true. This perhaps reflects that crisis of confidence in the supernatural world brought on by Thomas Hobbes, and this theme of crisis is also addressed by Robin Briggs, in his essay on Bodin, where the distance between species produced a problem of discernment, was it the voice of an angel or that of a devil, which undermined confidence in the supernatural and argued for a religion compatible with reason. As Maria Tausiat demonstrates in her essay on Spain, angels and devils were perceived to be locked in cosmic, and mortal, combat, each representing their master. This struggle was the subject of a text produced in mid seventeenth-century Spain by the Benedictine abbot, Francisco Blasco Lanuza, in which he reflected on the help he received from angels in combating an outbreak of demonic possession whilst working as a parish priest in a mountainous region of Aragon. This text was, essentially, an attempt to understand the existence of evil in the world, and the apparent arbitrariness of providence, and Lanuza deployed this cosmic battle to fortify the faith of the individual, within whose psyche that same battle waged, with the assurance of the final victory of the angels.

Angels also brought comfort to Protestant England, and especially around the deathbed, and Peter Marshall uses an array of liturgical texts and deathbed narratives to demonstrate the eclectic understandings of angels which abounded in early modern England, from the famous invocation of Horatio for Hamlet, to the deathbed trauma of the Puritan Joan Drake who, despite the assurances of nine divines, remained convinced that she was one of the reprobate until, at the last, the angels around her bed convinced her of her salvation. Such comfort was not without its problems in Protestant England, and Alexandra Walsham examines the iconographical evidence for angels, including that on memorial monuments (so comfort not just for the dying but for the bereaved), to argue for the richness of that visual culture, especially among the Arminians and post-1660, and for the cautious character of the English Reformation. However, angels remained potential sources of superstition and idolatry, as the saints had been, and the ambivalent place they held in official and popular religion is revealed in her telling concluding tale of the carpenter in the village of Bildeston in Sufolk who, on the orders of the churchwardens, cut down and burned the figures from the church's hammer beam roof as abominable idols. Even more strongly, in the febrile and threatening circumstances of county Cavan in Ireland following the insurrection of 1641, angelic intervention was eschewed by Protestants suffering at the hands of their Catholic neighbours, for it smacked too much of the other. The miraculous survival of the suckling son of the appropriately named minister, Faithfull Teate, was therefore told in directly providentialist terms to commissioners inquiring into the insurrection. By 1662, however, the story was placed in a section headed ‘Ministrations and communion with angels’ in Isaac Ambrose's Three great ordinances of Jesus Christ, and was later picked up by Richard Baxter under the title ‘Of good angels’. From this Raymond Gillespie reminds us of the importance, not only of ideas about angels, but also of how individuals in the past chose to use those ideas. This approach runs throughout the collection of essays. Just as some of the images used here (well chosen but not well produced I fear) show the angels pointing out the clear light of heaven to the young, so have these essays cast light on a shadowy and previously unexplored part of our mental map of the early modern world. A map which, as Owen Davies's final essay shows, also offers clear directions into what we like to think of as the modern period.