Angels and Belief in England, 1480-1700, by Laura Sangha

Abstract

In 1975 John Bossy, in his magisterial The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (rev. ante, xcii [1977], 134–7), considered that ‘to view a religious tradition, as a social historian must, as a continuum of behaviour rather than of belief, is generally to renounce the facility of a ready made corpus of evidence’ (p. 109). Since Bossy’s reflection on the methodologies of the social history of religion, historians have become bolder, or perhaps just more foolhardy. Rather than considering religion as practice or behaviour, they have tried to peer inside the minds of those who lived in the past in an attempt to discern patterns of belief. The reasons for this historiographical shift are not difficult to find: the collapse of the historical canon, the linguistic turn and the rise of cultural history at the expense of an older social history. More than any other work, Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (1997; rev. ante, cxiii [1998], 121–3) demonstrated the possibility of this approach by arguing that, within its own terms, early modern demonology was logical and consistent, built around oppositional ideas and expressions. As a result, the pages of recent historical works have become infested with ethereal beings, including ghosts, demons and angels, because they were ‘good to think with’ and hence provide a way into the minds and beliefs of early modern men and women. Laura Sangha’s book is the latest exploration of how early modern contemporaries thought about how one of this army of spirits moved between heaven, hell and earth as conveyors of supernatural revelation in the natural world—angels.