Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period

Jan Machielsen, DPhil (2011) in History, University of Oxford, is a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford and a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He has published several articles on the interplay of demonology and late humanism.Clare Copeland, DPhil (2010) in Theology, University of Oxford is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Catholicism at Somerville College, Oxford. Her monograph on canonization in early modern Italy is forthcoming with Oxford University Press

• List of Illustrations Editors’ Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction Clare Copeland & Jan MachielsenI Angels, Demons, and Everything in Between: Spiritual Beings in Early Modern Europe Euan CameronII Dangerous Visions: The Experience of Teresa of Avila and the Teaching of John of the Cross. Colin ThompsonIII Participating in the Divine: Visions and Ecstasies in a Florentine Convent Clare CopelandIV Heretical Saints and Textual Discernment: The Polemical Origins of the Acta Sanctorum (1643–1940)Jan MachielsenV Discerning the “Call” and Fashioning Dead Disciples: The Many Lives of Augustine Baker Victoria Van HyningVI A Seventeenth-Century Prophet confronts His Failures: Paul Felgenhauer’s Speculum Poenitentiae, Buß-Spiegel (1625) Leigh T. I. Penmanviii CONTENTSVII Visions, Dreams, and the Discernment of Prophetic Passions: Sense and Reason in the Writings of the Cambridge Platonists and John Beale, 1640–60 R. J. ScottVIII Gijsbert Voet and Discretio Spirituum after Descartes Anthony Ossa-RichardsonIX “Incorporeal Substances”: Discerning Angels in Later Seventeenth-Century England Laura SanghaAfterword: Angels of Light and Images of SanctityStuart Clark

“fascinating analyses […] these essays will be of interest to anyone interested in the history of early modern religion; among other things, they make useful, nuanced contributions to the debate on whether the Reformation fostered the disenchantment of the world.” Jeffrey R. Watt, University of Mississippi. In: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 65, No. 1 (January 2014), pp. 184-185.