Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100-1700 (Electronic book text)

This collection offers a new and compelling vision of the place of angels in medieval and early-modern Europe. Through literal and figurative conversations with angels, humans acquired or imagined new forms of knowledge and new understandings of the relationship between God and man and of the arrangement of the natural world. By looking at these conversations, the authors, from many disciplines, recover lost perspectives on the social and cultural histories of theology, magic, natural philosophy, music, and literature in medieval and early modern Europe. The essays explore points of convergence between the disciplines and between medieval and Renaissance theology, natural philosophy, politics and imaginative culture. They restore to angels some of the intellectual vitality and cultural substance that the centuries have taken away, and bring angels closer to humans.