Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in Post-Reformation England
By Alexandra Walsham
Past & Present Volume 208, Issue 1 (2010)
Introduction: Over the past twenty-five years historians have been engaged in a major enterprise of rediscovery. Beneath the surface of an early modern world ruptured by military conflict, political upheaval and religious turmoil they have revealed a parallel universe teeming with supernatural forces and magical creatures. Far from being a passive spectator on the workings of his Creation, God continued to intervene in temporal affairs frequently and unpredictably, to warn, try, punish and reward. He displayed his prescience and power in the guise of miracles, providences and prodigious signs. No less busy were Satan and his band of minions — witches, familiars and demons. Ever eager to wreak havoc on earth, the devil was particularly aggressive and restless in the last days, and was believed to be feverishly gathering his forces for the final apocalyptic battle that would herald the end of civilization in its current form. Alongside this, unruly spirits such as ghosts and fairies persisted in carrying out all sorts of mischief, to the perpetual irritation and annoyance of human beings.
In the midst of this spate of scholarly activity the beneficent operations of angels have been strangely neglected, at least until very recently. But that surprising omission is rapidly being corrected by a surge of current research on these celestial beings. It is now clear that they were an integral part of the outlook of individuals from all sections of the religious spectrum. Like their medieval predecessors, Roman Catholics continued to emphasize the multifarious roles of angels: as the ambassadors and messengers of God in the temporal world, as the special patrons and guardians of the faithful, as the Lord’s most powerful battalion in the fierce and ongoing war against Lucifer and his accomplices. Angels were also a constituent feature of Protestant mentalities: densely populating the pages of both the Old and New Testaments, they could hardly be discarded as one of the non-scriptural, ‘superstitious’ accretions Christianity had gathered during the long centuries of papal corruption. Despite their close connection with the tainted cult of saints, their presence in the Bible protected them from becoming casualties of the iconoclastic purge launched by Luther, Calvin and other reformers, though this process did not leave them entirely unscathed. Protestants dismissed some of the more dubious aspects of medieval angelology, including the complex hierarchy of ranks formalized by pseudo-Dionysius in the first century. Anxious to combat tendencies that smacked of idolatry, they were also at pains to insist that people should neither venerate nor pray directly to angels.
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