The dramatic restructuring of the religious landscape of sixteenth-century England was to have a profound effect on belief about angels. The decades between 1530 and 1580 witnessed the transformation of parochial religious culture as the authorities struck at the heart of the principal expressions of communal faith and observance. The papacy, mass, monastic institutions, intercessory prayer, purgatory, and the cult of the saints came under sustained attack, and traditional religion was comprehensively overhauled. From the perspective of reformers committed to the principles of sola fidei and sola scriptura, traditional understanding of the angels themselves involved certain indefensible elements, focused around their assumed role as mediators between men and the divine. Furthermore angels were associated with Catholic devotional practices that to the reformers reeked of ‘superstition’, and there was intense anxiety about the veneration accorded to them, particularly those with names and cult followings. As Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham note in the introduction to their collection of essays on celestial beings, ‘angels had been badly compromised by their collaboration with many of the worst excesses of the late medieval devotional regime’.

However, albeit somewhat altered, angels survived the vicissitudes of the profoundly destructive English Reformation, and went on to assume a new status in the post-Reformation era. The fundamental reason for this was their sound scriptural credentials.