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Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in Early Modern England

  • Chapter
Conversations with Angels

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Abstract

In 1601, an angel was sighted upon an altar in England bearing a naked sword, which it ‘glitteringly brandished up and down, foyning sometimes, and sometimes striking; thereby threatning… an instant destruction to this Kingdome’.* Disseminated orally and scribally at home, the story of this strange apparition soon travelled across the Channel to Catholic Europe, where it was recorded by the Italian cardinal and church historian Cesare Baronius and subsequently recounted by other Tridentine writers as a sign of divine anger at the infection of the English nation by heresy. The vision of this avenging angel was a clear warning that the Lord would very soon intervene to punish the country for abandoning the faith of its forefathers in favour of a false, new-fangled and upstart religion. It gave vivid expression to a vein of militant anti-Protestant defiance that made it a powerful emblem of the ongoing polemical and pastoral struggle of the Church of Rome and its agents to resist and reverse the Reformation. But it also made it a focus for the mocking contempt of the Anglican bishop Joseph Hall. Hall listed it, along with ‘a thousand more [tales] of the same branne’, as evidence of the foolish credulity of the papists and the fraudulent devices by which the Catholic clergy kept them in subjugation.1

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Alexandra Walsham
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of East Anglia, UK

    Joad Raymond (Professor of English Literature) (Professor of English Literature)

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© 2011 Alexandra Walsham

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Walsham, A. (2011). Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in Early Modern England. In: Raymond, J. (eds) Conversations with Angels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316973_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316973_12

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36260-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-31697-3

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