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

All those interested in religious history in the early modern period.

List of Illustrations ...................................................... ix
Editors’ Acknowledgments ............................................ xi
Notes on Contributors ................................................ xiii

Introduction ............................................................... 1
Clare Copeland & Jan Machielsen

I Angels, Demons, and Everything in Between: Spiritual Beings in Early Modern Europe ......................... 15
Euan Cameron

II Dangerous Visions: The Experience of Teresa of Avila and the Teaching of John of the Cross.............................51
Colin Thompson

III Participating in the Divine: Visions and Ecstasies in a Florentine Convent ............................................... 71
Clare Copeland

IV Heretical Saints and Textual Discernment: The Polemical Origins of the Acta Sanctorum (1643–1940).......................103
Jan Machielsen

V Discerning the “Call” and Fashioning Dead Disciples: The Many Lives of Augustine Baker ............................... 141 Victoria Van Hyning

VI A Seventeenth-Century Prophet confronts His Failures: Paul Felgenhauer’s Speculum Poenitentiae, Buß-Spiegel (1625) ...................................................... 167
Leigh T. I. Penman

viii CONTENTS

VII Visions, Dreams, and the Discernment of Prophetic Passions: Sense and Reason in the Writings of the Cambridge Platonists and John Beale, 1640–60 ................................203
R. J. Scott

VIII Gijsbert Voet and Discretio Spirituum after Descartes .......... 237
Anthony Ossa-Richardson

IX “Incorporeal Substances”: Discerning Angels in Later Seventeenth-Century England ..................................... 257 Laura Sangha

Afterword: Angels of Light and Images of Sanctity ..