Angels Angelology In The Middle Ages

Angels have made a remarkable comeback in the popular imagination; their real heyday, however, was the Middle Ages. This text offers a study of angels and angelology in the Middle Ages, seeking to discover how and why angels became so important in medieval society.

Recently angels have made a remarkable comeback in the popular imagination; their real heyday, however, was the Middle Ages. From the great shrines dedicated to Michael the Archangel at Mont-St-Michel and Monte Garano to the elaborate metaphysical speculations of the great thirteenth-century scholastics, angels dominated the physical, temporal, and intellectual landscape of the medieval West. This book offers a full-scale study of angels and angelology in the Middle Ages. Seeking to discover how and why angels became so important in medieval society, David Keck considers a wide range of fascinating questions such as: Why do angels appear on baptismal fonts? How and why did angels become normative for certain members of the church? How did they become a required course of study? Did popular beliefs about angels diverge from the angelologies of the theologians? Why did some heretics claim to derive their authority from heavenly spirits? Keck spreads his net wide in the attempt to catch traces of angels and angelic beliefs in as many portions of the medieval world as possible. Metaphysics and mystery plays, prayers and pilgrimages, Cathars and cathedrals-all these and many more disparate sources taken together reveal a society deeply engaged with angels on all its levels and in some unlikely ways.

This book examines the role of angels in medieval and Renaissance art and religion from Dante to the Counter-Reformation.

The nature and properties of angels occupied a prominent place in medieval philosophical inquiry. Creatures of two worlds, angels provided ideal ground for exploring the nature of God and his creation, being perceived as 'models' according to which a whole range of questions were defined, from cosmological order, movement and place, to individuation, cognition, volition, and modes of language. This collection of essays is a significant scholarly contribution to angelology, centred on the function and significance of angels in medieval speculation and its history. The unifying theme is that of the role of angels in philosophical inquiry, where each contribution represents a case study in which the angelic model is seen to motivate developments in specific areas and periods of medieval philosophical thought.

In the modern world, angels can often seem to be no more than a symbol, but in the Middle Ages men and women thought differently. Some offered prayers intended to secure the angelic assistance for the living and the dead; others erected stone monuments carved with images of winged figures; and still others made angels the subject of poetic endeavour and theological scholarship. This wealth of material has never been fully explored, and was once dismissed as the detritus of a superstitious age. Angels in Early Medieval England offers a different perspective, by using angels as a prism through which to study the changing religious culture of an unfamiliar age. Focusing on one corner of medieval Europe which produced an abundance of material relating to angels, Richard Sowerby investigates the way that ancient beliefs about angels were preserved and adapted in England during the Anglo-Saxon period. Between the sixth century and the eleventh, the convictions of Anglo-Saxon men and women about the world of the spirits underwent a gradual transformation. This book is the first to explore that transformation, and to show the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons tried to reconcile their religious inheritance with their own perspectives about the world, human nature, and God.

This book studies medieval theories of angelology insofar as they made groundbreaking contributions to medieval philosophy. It centers on the period from Bonaventure to Ockham while also discussing some original positions by earlier thinkers.

This is a comprehensive introduction to a rapidly growing subject and provides key resources for thinking about key aspects of television studies. It begins with a critical evaluation of approaches that can be used to study television and introduces institutional, textual, cultural, economic, production and audience centred ways of researching and analysing television.

"A collection of essays examining medieval and early modern texts aimed at performing magic or receiving illumination via the mediation of angels. Includes discussion of Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts"--Provided by publisher.

The field of angelology is vast. This thesis investigates the artistic representations of angels from the Late Middle Ages through the Reformation, from c.1450 to c.1650. This is achieved by a careful selection of material which demonstrates how the angelic form mutated in response to the religious and political changes experienced in England during this time. Thus, attention has been focussed on three main areas that form the components of this study: Chapter one investigates the integral role that angels played in the late-medieval Catholic belief system, drawing on primary and secondary literature to demonstrate how scholars viewed angels and specifically, how they categorised and differentiated the various orders of angels. Chapter two examines four case studies of representations of the angelic hierarchy at a local and national level, in different media, in order to evaluate how the doctrine surveyed in chapter one was manifested in artistic practice, with special attention to how angels were depicted on the eve of the Reformation. Chapter three examines the Reformation in terms of angelology, with particular regard to the European and English reformers' views on the artistic representation of these celestial creatures, from the beginnings of religious change to the era of the Commonwealth. The hypothesis that angels were not represented on tomb monuments in the Elizabethan period is tested, by investigating the counties of Leicestershire and Rutland, looking at the monuments of the period c. 1550-c.1650. This chapter also addresses how the English responded to the call of the iconoclasts and investigates whether angels were treated in the same conceptual and ideological category as the saints, or if they managed to survive. I shall contend that despite the changes to Christianity in England, during the period of concern for this study, angels continued to be part of the faith as demonstrated by their continued portrayal in art and sculpture.

This volume explores the role of belief in the existence of angels in the early modern world.