Richard Sowerby – författare

In the modern world, angels can often seem to be no more than a symbol, but in the Middle Ages men and women thought differently. Some offered prayers intended to secure the angelic assistance for the living and the dead; others erected stone monuments carved with images of winged figures; and still others made angels the subject of poetic endeavour and theological scholarship. This wealth of material has never been fully explored, and was once dismissed as the detritus of a superstitious age. Angels in Early Medieval England offers a different perspective, by using angels as a prism through which to study the changing religious culture of an unfamiliar age.Focusing on one corner of medieval Europe which produced an abundance of material relating to angels, Richard Sowerby investigates the way that ancient beliefs about angels were preserved and adapted in England during the Anglo-Saxon period. Between the sixth century and the eleventh, the convictions of Anglo-Saxon men and women about the world of the spirits underwent a gradual transformation. This book is the first to explore that transformation, and to show the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons tried to reconcile their religious inheritance with their own perspectives about the world, human nature, and God.

When men and women in early medieval England thought about the world around them, they did so in ways that often strike us as strange. In their surviving writings, we are confronted continually with unfamiliar ideas - about the creatures and beings which populated the world, about the forces and phenomena which shaped it, and about the ways in which human beings might enact change upon it through ritual, magic, and prayer. Although unfamiliar, these ideas give us important indications of how early medieval English thinkers characterized and categorized their surroundings and their experiences. Of substantial interest to many of them was the question of how they might distinguish correctly between what was 'natural' in the world, and what was not. This Element examines what that distinction meant to the inhabitants of early medieval England, and under what circumstances they felt compelled to explore it.

When men and women in early medieval England thought about the world around them, they did so in ways that often strike us as strange. In their surviving writings, we are confronted continually with unfamiliar ideas - about the creatures and beings which populated the world, about the forces and phenomena which shaped it, and about the ways in which human beings might enact change upon it through ritual, magic, and prayer. Although unfamiliar, these ideas give us important indications of how early medieval English thinkers characterized and categorized their surroundings and their experiences. Of substantial interest to many of them was the question of how they might distinguish correctly between what was 'natural' in the world, and what was not. This Element examines what that distinction meant to the inhabitants of early medieval England, and under what circumstances they felt compelled to explore it.