The Arrival of Angels

Abstract Chapter 1 traces the images of angels and sacred embodiment as these emerge within the culture of eleventh- and twelfth-century reforms and underwrite its suspicion (and ultimate rejection) of popular charismatics. In an unrecognized irony, reformers’ model of a sexually purified and angelic priesthood came to require both persistent defense and the unholy specter of demonic transfiguration (2 Cor. 11:14) as the countervailing threat to clerical authority and its narratives of spiritual power. The anxieties informing the several cultural transitions underway throughout the twelfth century were accordingly projected onto holy men and women, including anchorites, whose spirituality was often assumed to be in competition with that authority and potentially out of alignment with orthodox culture generally. Through forms of imitatio clerici/angeli, a subject to which later chapters will return, anchorites not only resembled their (at times unreformed) clerical counterparts but even outstripped them in charismatic power.