ABSTRACT This article presents a new reading of the soul and the body according to St. Teresa of Ávila. Highlighting the importance of image making within medieval monasticism and Teresa’s practice of recogimiento (recollection), the article argues that a new approach to the interpretation of mystical texts is required. The experiential and pedagogical intentions behind Teresa’s texts call to a mode of reading that reflects her embodied engagement with textual imagery in recogimiento. By developing a parallel practice of image making as an approach to her texts, the article argues that it is possible to develop a closer reading of her soul. This reading explores the sensoriality of her images to consider how they speak to a soul entangled with the interior of her body. Considering this reciprocity of body and soul, a new understanding of Teresa’s conception of spiritual sensation is presented as a functional continuity between the senses of the body and soul.

ABSTRACT Beginning with the perception of God as warrior in the Hebrew Bible, the article explores the image of God as charioteer in a spectrum of theophanic texts, both biblical and parabiblical, underlying Jewish apocalyptic traditions translated into Christian beliefs surrounding the Cross as means of heavenly ascent. Equating the Cross with the tetramorphic chariot-throne of God in Ezekiel’s visions, an interpretive tradition mediated primarily through Syriac Christianity and rooted in the Christology of the New Testament, Armenian interpreters expanded the tradition. A close reading of early Armenian texts conveying the reception and transmission of the imagery of Christ as charioteer shows an expansion to a point of reordering the chariot’s heavenly ascent to earthly descent, a divine visitation to the land of Armenia, thus driving the tradition to a sort of realized eschatology.

ABSTRACT It has been observed that Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur exhibits the active and contemplative lives much discussed in medieval England as modes of Christian living. However, no one has yet explored how Malory examines the lives by foregrounding sight, which in the Morte is vital to action and contemplation. Sight brings people into relation with one another and with God but it can also mesmerize minds and overwhelm bodies. This article argues that Malory stresses the need to educate the sense of sight and better understand visual connection. His portrayal of seeing helps elucidate medieval England’s evolving models of sense perception and religious life.

Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe is a reflection of the multifarious and dynamic conference from which it emerged, held in Oxford in 2018. While this collection cannot fully mirror the conference as a whole and the generative discussions it promoted, it has brought together established Kempe experts to revisit The Book and explore it from new perspectives. The volume has much to offer not just to Kempe scholars but also to those working more broadly on the late Middle Ages. It contributes to a host of scholarly fields, such as the study of late medieval history, literature, culture, devotional practices, digital humanities, and gender studies.Diane Watt’s essay, “Before Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe and its Antecedents,” which opens the collection, seeks to shift the way we think of Kempe and her text, positioning her not as the starting point of female English writing but as part of a continuum beginning several centuries before. Watt situates The Book within a long English tradition of female pilgrimage accounts, rather than the late medieval pan-European tradition that it is generally read within, convincingly linking Kempe’s work to a different textual community.In “Margery Kempe, Oral History, and the Value of Intersubjectivity,” Katherine J. Lewis employs oral history methodologies to explore the collaborative process of the text’s production and argues for Kempe’s decisive role in the elaboration of both The Book’s content and form. Lewis expands the use of oral history, generally applied within the context of contemporary history and living-witness interviews, to the interrogation of premodern sources, thus offering an important contribution to Kempe scholarship and medieval scholarship in general. In this approach, Lewis uses both the devotional practice of confession, mentioned frequently in the text, and the structure of the text itself, the chronological jumble of the narration, to support her argument. This essay expands the scholarly toolbox by showing that oral history can be a generative methodology for those seeking to access medieval texts, events, and experiences in Kempe or similar medieval sources.One of the major contributions of the collection lies in the three chapters that explore the importance of the oft overlooked prayers that close The Book. Josephine A. Koster’s “The Prayers of Margery Kempe: A Reassessment” is one of the essays interrogating how these entreaties function within the general structure of the text and the hagiographical argument it attempts to make, and illustrates how the prayers are an integral part of Kempe’s self-fashioning. Koster also shows how these closing texts rework contemporary prayers and engage with popular devotional practices, and uses them as a way to better understand Kempe’s lived experience. Laura Varnam, who together with Laura Kalas organized the Oxford conference and co-edited the collection, discusses how the prayers were specifically designed to be performed, tying them into her broader argument, which demonstrates how The Book functioned as a guide and example for Kempe’s lay medieval readers. In her essay, “‘A Booke of Hyr Felyngys’: Exemplarity and Margery Kemp’s Encounters of the Heart,” Varnam traces how Kempe, through established methods of stirring emotions and popular devotional practices, puts forth a new model for intense lay piety, and shows how Kempe draws on popular devotional language and imagery. In her argument, Varnam employs manuscript evidence, primarily the annotations, to illustrate how The Book was viewed by readers as a devotional guide. In this case, exact references to all the folios cited from the manuscript would have been welcome, since they are crucial to the essay’s argument.The collection includes two essays that shine a light on the potential that archival research holds for adding to our understanding of Kempe, The Book, and its context. “Margery Kempe’s Home Town and Worthy Kin” is the product of Susan Maddock’s revisiting of King Lynn’s archives to comb through manuscripts and sources that were inaccessible to Stanford Brown Meech. Maddock presents new materials concerning Kempe’s family links outside Lynn and the socioeconomic dynamics of the city. Maddock’s essay is a useful tool for scholars, teachers, and students, explaining key terms and concepts, as well as expanding upon what was already known about Kempe’s familial and social connections.Anthony Bale and Daniela Giosuè’s essay, “A Women’s Network in Fifteenth-Century Rome: Margery Kempe Encounters ‘Margaret Florentine,’” is also a product of recent archival research. Following the clues offered in The Book, Bale and Giosuè have identified the “Margaret Florentyne,” whom Kempe encountered in Assisi and again in Rome, as Margherita degli Alberti (d. after 1417), a member of the wealthy Alberti banking family from Florence who was living in Rome at the time. The authors trace the circles of Dominican-Brigittine female patronage Kempe interacted with in the Eternal City, deepening our understanding of Kempe’s Brigittine devotion in Rome. Building on the work of scholars such as Nirit Ben-Aryen Debby and Maria Oen, Bale and Giosuè identify Kempe’s Dominican network in Rome. Accordingly, this chapter would be useful also to those working on St. Bridget of Sweden and her cult. However, this study could have benefited from greater contextualization. While mentioning the papacy, it does not address the Papal Schism and the tumultuous conditions in Rome at the time of Kempe’s visit, which impacted the city’s social and cultural makeup. Moreover, the chapter jumps between different decades of the fifteenth century without mentioning the profound political tensions, events, and circumstances that impacted at different times the people and places discussed.Kempe’s continental influences are also explored in Liz Herbert McAvoy and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa’s essay, “The Intertextual Dialogue and Conversational Theology of Mechtild of Hackeborn and Margery Kempe.” This is an abbreviated version of their 2020 article in Spicilegium, which expands upon the suggestion made by Hope Emily Allen that Kempe was familiar with and influenced by Mechtild of Hackeborn’s Boke of Gostely Grace. The essay traces the different routes through which Kempe would have encountered the earlier work, touching upon textual communities connected to Brigittine and Carthusian orders that she was connected to. The essay also discusses the possibility, raised previously by Santha Bhattacharji, that Kempe’s daughter-in-law served as her initial scribe.The collection also seeks to read The Book within the context of the Global Middle Ages through Dorothy Kim’s essay, “Margery Kempe, Racialised Soundscapes, Sonic Wars, and Cosmopolitan Jerusalem.” Kim’s essay offers solid background and historical context to Kempe’s travels and her experiences within Jerusalem and the Holy Land. It also draws attention to the importance of sound and sound making within religious identity and devotional practices using modern digital tools. Beyond painting Kempe as more cosmopolitan in her influences and behaviors, Kim’s essay interrogates digital humanities and how we engage with its practices as both consumers and producers.The collection’s closing section, “Performative Encounters,” contains essays by Sarah Salih (“Writing Performed Lives: Margery Kempe Meets Marina Abramović”) and Tara Williams (“Recreating and Reassessing Margery and Julian’s Encounter”), which read The Book in connection to modern performances, artistic and theatrical respectively. The use of modern perspectives in both essays highlights Kempe’s agency in constructing her authority and fashioning her public image as a holy woman.This collection is a useful research tool for scholars, teachers, and students working on Kempe or the late Middle Ages. However, as a resource, the collection suffers from some weaknesses, mainly within its critical apparatus. Throughout the volume, references are made to the current state of research and developments in the field of Kempe studies, which is described as having been reinvigorated by “new theoretical, methodological and critical approaches” (3). However, these statements are not accompanied by any citations or additional information, neither in the body of the text nor the footnotes. This undermines the volume’s ability to further the state of research and to be a more useful aid to scholars by fully engaging with other works in the field. The many internal citations highlight this missed opportunity even more, making the collection excessively self-referential. Footnotes throughout contain references to other essays in the collection rather than pointing readers to external sources and relevant studies, both old and new, some of which have been published by authors included in the volume.Still, Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe has much to offer to Kempe scholarship, reflecting on and contributing greatly to the field’s growing acknowledgment of Kempe’s intentionality in constructing her authority and self-representation through her text, as well as her role in its production. The collection also offers varied and innovative contributions to the understanding of female authority and sanctity, religious practices, continental devotional practices, and many more aspects of late-medieval studies. This volume would be a welcome addition in both institutional libraries and on the shelves of most scholars of the period.

ABSTRACT Simon of Lipnica, who died in 1482, was counted among the blessed in 1685, has been a saint of the Catholic Church since 2007, and was a Franciscan Observant associated with the priory founded by Johannes of Capestrano in the suburb of Krakow, is one of the not fully recognized figures building the image of Polish religious culture. After his death, a “miracle office” was established in the Bernardine priory, where miraculous events through the intercession of Simon were recorded meticulously on an ongoing basis. In this way, the largest Polish late-medieval collection de miraculis was created. Drawing from the new critical edition, this article presents this monument not only in the context of the first years of Simon’s “miracle office” but also in the context of the development of the miraculum as a literary genre.

Assaf Pinkus’s opening questions in Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany transcend the medieval context of his case studies. Consuming violence through visual culture routinely dominates our modern forms of entertainment. Why is this? What does violence offer its audiences? What inspiration does violence provide to artists? In answering these questions, Pinkus shines a spotlight on a little-studied category of medieval Christian images that he terms “galleries of violence” (2). Monumental martyr cycles crafted in fourteenth-century German-speaking regions convey to their viewers emphatic violence and brutality toward the saintly body, even resulting in the individual erasure of the saint so that only the graphic mutilated body remains. Pinkus argues that these galleries of violence address their viewers through the rhetoric of “visual aggression” producing a somaesthetic experience between object and viewer that he identifies as “bodily imagination” (4–5). Per Pinkus, this instantaneous, corporeal participation refers to “the ways in which the images encouraged viewers, on the one hand to imagine the depicted tortures and pains on and through their own bodies as their own suffering, and on the other hand, to project their own bodies, imaginations, and range of associations related to the visualized torments upon the images” (5).Drawing on a multifaceted methodology, he adopts the language and theory of somaesthetic experience from Richard Shusterman and applies Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, thereby incorporating detailed iconographic analysis as well as investigating the changing definitions of words used to describe violence in Middle–High German and Latin. Pinkus repeatedly articulates the differences between his “gallery of violence” examples and the oft-studied category of imitatio Christi iconography that were—in the context of manuscript illuminations—primarily the purview of a narrow audience of mystics, members of religious orders, and literates. With this distinction, Pinkus expands beyond the positive associations of blood as a substance primarily communicating not violence but the sacrificial mystery of the Eucharist, as argued by Caroline Walker Bynum. While noting the validity of this interpretation, Pinkus argues that “it is hardly conceivable that the viewers’ immediate encounter with these newly formulated galleries of violence and the brutality of the depictions evoked happiness and love rather than abjection and horror” (26). Instead, the monumental and public character of galleries of violence imagery require looking beyond devotional practice and the easy mapping of violence imagery to the Life of Christ.The first chapter, “Visual Rhetoric,” begins with an examination of the sculpture adorning the portals of Holy Cross Minster in Schwäbisch Gmünd. Pinkus questions how medieval viewers responded to this extreme and graphic violence, emphasizing the importance of bodily response and influence of Thomas Aquinas’s mid-thirteenth-century formulation of the psychosomatic unity of body and soul. This new concern of the fourteenth century is traced through the evolution of words, such as the Middle High German word gewalt, which expanded beyond meaning political power, authority, and dominion to also include violence, or negative physical force on the body that could be evaluated according to legal and ethical metrics. This line of inquiry is continued in the second chapter, “Between Theological and Juridical Positions,” where he turns to another case of exterior sculpture at the Church of St. Theobald at Thann, in Alsace. Using the Annales compiled by local Franciscans, Pinkus grounds the iconographic interpretation of the Thann sculptural program in the region’s local history, such as plague and periodic marauding and attacks. Within this framing, the seemingly unorganized violence of martyrdom resolves into a pictorial program reflecting changing legal standards of verifying truth, privileging eyewitness testimony over the verifying ordeal. The sculpted tortures and martyrdoms showcase not only the bodily suffering of the saint but also reenact “law and authority, suggesting the triumph of reason and offering a model for the local inhabitants to think of themselves as new martyrs” (61).Chapter 3, “Bodily Imagination, Imaged Bodies,” shifts its evidentiary approach to examine two iconographical examples of martyrdom more broadly through the torments of St. Bartholomew and St. Catherine of Alexandria. The framework of somaesthetics proves crucial to this chapter’s analysis that the visualization of pain and bodily violence reflects the movement away from the conventional emotionless and passive acceptance of martyrdom toward expressions of pain and bodily sensation. Chapter 4, “Eroticized and Sexualized Bodies,” continues the focused examination of specific saints from the perspective of gender, analyzing the tortures applied to the bodies of St. Agatha and St. Barbara. With chapters 3 and 4, the role of medium is expanded, supplementing the sculpted violence seen on the facades at Schwäbisch Gmünd and Thann with the illusionistic violence portrayed via two-dimensional painted altarpieces, focusing on fifteenth-century works such as Stefan Lochner’s Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles. This evidentiary shift culminates in the fifth chapter, “The Body Reincarnated,” where the analysis is refocused upon three quite different objects: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Shreinmadonna, bust reliquaries associated with Cologne’s Cult of the Virgin Martyrs, and a hybrid panel painting of the Crucifixion now located in Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. Pinkus employs the better surviving coloration of these objects and their varied “transformative” qualities to interrogate how medium and coloration affect not only the visualization of violence but also the viewer’s somatic interaction with it (99). Building on understandings of the capacity for sculpture to come alive in the medieval imagination, Pinkus concludes that galleries of violence “attack the senses of the viewers through the interplay of composition, color, material and media” making the violence real for the minds and bodies of the viewers through bodily imagination (112).While the chronological scope of this study is quite brief, primarily encompassing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this undergirds his argument about the somatic power of violence imagery as expressed via bodily imagination, thereby reflecting contemporary desires to define violence in the language of ethics and morality as well as setting restrictions upon it and the newly conceptualized physical self. Visual Aggression is not only valuable as a new resource engaging with an infrequently studied category of objects, Pinkus’s analysis of monumental and public facing devotional imagery also provides a much-needed counterpoint to the more frequently discussed objects and devotional practices used by medieval mystics and religious communities. Some questions of audience and the role of location, particularly the perception of violence imagery within the church via painted altarpieces and outside on the facade of sacred space, remain unexplored. Pinkus’s case studies are also firmly grounded in the Christian religious and cultural majority of late medieval Europe. While noting the violence and blame enacted against nearby Jewish communities for the plague and violence that dominate the fourteenth-century Annales of Thann, Pinkus does not discuss whether the evolving artistic innovations or linguistic understandings of violence also appear or prompt reactions in non-Christian contexts, which could be an area for further exploration. Overall, Visual Aggression provides a fascinating new perspective on the visualization of violence in religious contexts, the changing ethical and moral frameworks appearing in artistic exploration of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the power of somatic response and bodily imagination in interpreting violence in medieval Christian practice.

ABSTRACT A unique fifteenth-century Middle English visionary account survives about a nun of Hampole Priory who saves the soul of her deceased brother. Scholars have long considered it an authentic narrative from Hampole Priory. Yet, near-identical texts in Dutch and German manuscripts suggest that it is a translation of a Continental source instead. My analysis shows that while the Continental versions were designed for female religious readers, the English version was adapted for a lay audience. I argue that Hampole Priory used the reworked narrative to promote its intercessory prayers among and attract donations from lay benefactors.

At the heart of Rebel Angels: Space and Sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England is a fairly straightforward but undeniably compelling question—how did the story of the angel’s rebellion against God influence systems of power in early England? Jill Fitzgerald offers a comprehensive analysis of both Latin and Old English sources that draw on the angelic rebellion, including poetry, sermons, hagiography, letters, land grants, and charters. She argues that the angelic rebellion is used to justify social and religious hierarchies through appeals to the inheritance of spiritual and physical space. These appeals draw on the replacement doctrine, which held that humans were created to repopulate the space that angels once occupied. Fitzgerald states that the replacement doctrine “assumed a status of a dominant mythos or social theory, a way of crafting meaning for the Anglo-Saxons as a Christian community” (2). According to Fitzgerald, the early English viewed themselves as especially poised to inherit the territory left empty by the rebel angels. They saw their role in the divine hierarchy as one deeply reliant on obedience, in contrast to the faithless angels, and they applied the same rules to justify their sovereignty in physical space as well. By “tethering replacement principles” (3) to spiritual and political systems of power and beliefs, the English organized their world around ideals of compensation, justice, and restoration of what has been lost.Though John Milton’s Paradise Lost perhaps offers the most well-known literary depiction of the angelic rebellion and fall of Lucifer into hell, the story was featured in Old English texts with some frequency. In fact, for years scholars have floated the possibility that texts like the Old English Genesis inspired Milton’s own characterization of Lucifer’s expulsion and the establishment of the kingdom of hell. In addition to the Old English Genesis, the tale appears in poems such as Christ and Satan, Guthlac A, and Andreas, among others. In these poems, the story generally appears as reminder that order will be restored to the divine hierarchy, meaning that those who rebel against God are expelled and punished, while the faithful are rewarded and incorporated into heaven’s divine inheritance. The angelic rebellion also appears in early English exegetical writing, monastic letters, and sermons. Scholarship about the rebel angels in early England approaches the story almost exclusively through the lens of English Christianity and popular spiritual belief. What makes Fitzgerald’s intervention important is her holistic attention to the narrative, both inside and outside of direct spiritual contexts. By engaging with the interplay of historical and religious documents, Fitzgerald demonstrates how literature shaped English social and political practice, as well as how social and political practice shaped English literature. In other words, Fitzgerald examines the stakes of spiritual rebellion in the literary imaginary in order to interpret and discuss the social, legal, and political practices in early medieval England.Rebel Angels is organized by textual genre. The first portion of the book is grounded in historical and legal contexts, while the remainder of the book is dedicated to depictions of the rebel angels in literature. However, Fitzgerald is careful to avoid discussing texts in isolation. Instead, she deploys a combination of source study, material history, and literary analysis to foreground how text and social practice interact. In the introduction, Fitzgerald establishes the correlation between the angelic rebellion and spiritual and earthly territory. She builds largely on Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and Jacques Le Goff’s “Discorso di chiusura” (from Popoli e paesi nella cultura alltomedievale, Spoleto: Presso la sede del Centro, 1983), both of which explore the relationships between space, sovereignty, and power. She states that “cultures imagine themselves according to distinct spatial structures and organisations, whether those spaces are in their possession or simply desired and hoped for” (11). Fitzgerald argues that English depictions of the fall of the angels is unique in comparison to Irish or Scandinavian accounts because English authors are careful to point out how “at the moment of angelic creation, there are no pre-existing legal orders in place, only systems of obligation and reciprocity” (13). After the fall, however, it became necessary to establish formal commandments and laws, and to create humankind to repair the divine hierarchy following the loss of God’s subjects. In this way, the fall of the angels acts as a model for systems of power and governance, while also justifying the existence of those structures in the first place.The fall of the angels thus also operates as a sort of origin myth that frames English systems of power within a divinely ordered hierarchy. In chapter 1, “Lands Idle and Unused,” Fitzgerald explores how this origin story is inflected in legal discourses of land ownership, inheritance, and sovereignty. She discusses proems of land charters between the reigns of Edgar and Æthelred that reference the angelic rebellion before establishing the transfer or re-granting of property. Moreover, this chapter provides insight into the legal repercussions of rebellion and treachery alongside Old English poetic accounts of the angelic rebellion. Fitzgerald’s interest in mental and physical spaces left idel ond unnut (idle and unused), as the Genesis A-poet puts it, are especially interesting in this chapter, as is her discussion of English conceptions of homeland (eðel) as they relate to the occupation and control of land. Fitzgerald asserts that “the sin of the rebel angels was frequently understood as a psychological lapse with spatial consequences” (60), illustrating how intertwined mental and physical spaces were within English conceptions of sovereignty and inheritance in this life and the next.The second chapter, “The Anxiety of Inheritance,” extends this conversation to the Old English poem Genesis B, which characterizes Satan’s rebellion as an inability to accept limitations on his own power and territorial ambitions. As Fitzgerald puts it, Satan’s desire to build his own kingdom to rival God’s is a “breach of his social, spatial, and spiritual limitations” (74). Satan’s territorial overreach subverts the narrative of inheritance through obedience, which results in the denial of his own homeland. Fitzgerald also incorporates into this chapter a discussion of the angelic rebellion in Irish apocryphal traditions. She concludes that, while Irish sources tend to depict Satan as reacting to heavenly limitations, both mental and spatial, English writers “represent heaven as a place of unspecified limits and indeterminate boundaries” (83) before the angelic rebellion.The following chapter, “Rebel Clerics, Monastic Replacements,” does similar work, this time building on Bede’s concerns about monastic lands and secular canons. As stated in his letters, Bede viewed spiritual corruption as an echo of angelic rebellion, a characterization that inspired reformers in the late tenth century to compare their ecclesiastical rivals to rebel angels. Consequently, “the fall of the angels narrative became a prism through which to view and later filter the turbulent events of this era” (117). Fitzgerald draws on the “New Minster Charter,” which served as the official royal and religious response to the conflict of secular canons. The document opens with the story of the rebel angels and paints the secular clerics at Winchester as oppositional to God and to the English religious community. The New Minster Charter interweaves royal and ecclesiastical power, forging new ideas of kingship and spiritual sovereignty. As Fitzgerald writes, “by removing the rebellious canons from the ecclesiastical hierarchy and appropriating the doctrine of replacement,” the early monastic reformers implied that the way to heaven would be jointly secured by King Edgar and a reformed monasticism (147).Chapters 4 and 5 continue this examination of the rebel angels in religious literary culture. “The Angels’ Share” discusses how rehearsals of angelic rebellion acted as a sort of talisman or charm for English Christians—a “protective ritual written across both bodies and landscapes” (160). The fusion of body and landscape in these performances reinforces Fitzgerald’s argument that the rebel angels’ narrative cemented ideas of inheritance and divine order in early English popular belief. In “A Homeland as a Possession,” Fitzgerald returns to the New Minster Charter to compare the revocation of clerical lands and removal of the secular canons to Satan’s own loss of territory after his disobedience. She frames this discussion through the Rogationtide festival, which symbolically reenacted the fall of the angels, and looked forward to the Last Judgment when Christians would occupy their place heaven. In addition to highlighting the correlation between Rogationtide and the angelic rebellion, Fitzgerald provides an intriguing analysis of transitions and movements across space in the Old English poem Christ and Satan. The language of “turning back” and “encircling” featured in this poem reflects the circuitous organization of Rogationtide and invites readers to tread the path toward redemption.In her final chapter, “A New Praedestinati in Wulstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos,” Fitzgerald offers a new way to read Wulfstan’s “Sermon of the Wolf to the English.” She argues that Wulfstan appeals to the replacement doctrine to condemn the English for believing they are predestined to divine inheritance, comparing the English to the rebel angels and stating that they were actively erasing themselves from salvation. Fitzgerald also includes an afterword, in which she restates the stakes of the book and emphasizes the importance of reading across genre. She concludes that the overall impression one gains from examining these diverse works is that “the fall of the angels mythos—and the restructuring of of the heavenly and earthly politics in its aftermath—gave the Anglo-Saxons a way to imagine the construction of their own earthly society, and a means to understand how they could chart clear paths to a heavenly one” (279).Overall, Rebel Angels is a fantastic resource collating stories of angelic rebellion in early medieval England. Fitzgerald’s dedication to providing a thoroughly discussed and comprehensive record of these narratives, and the examination of historical documents alongside literary texts offers nuanced insight into the role that these stories played in both secular and ecclesiastical settings. However, a closer engagement with Lefebvre’s The Production of Space would have been beneficial to the book’s overall argument. Though Fitzgerald cites Lefebvre’s observation that sovereignty implies space, she does not offer further elaboration on why this is the case. In The Production of Space Lefebvre argues that the “space” in which sovereignty operates is “the space of the ruling class's hegemony over its people and over the nationhood that it has arrogated” (281). Moreover, he writes that state sovereignty “was constituted as an imaginary and real, abstract-concrete ‘being’ which recognized no restraints upon itself other than those deriving from relations based on force (its relations with its own internal components, and those with its congeners—invariably rivals and virtual adversaries)” (279). Lefebvre’s attention to issues of state violence and systems of power distribution among the elite can shed additional light on Fitzgerald’s own discussion of Satan’s rebellion against divine authority and his construction of a subversive, alternative kingdom in hell.Fitzgerald’s work opens the door for future studies that more fully explore the interaction of sovereignty and space in early England. Fitzgerald chooses not to critically address how many of the rebel angels narratives are couched within appeals to English origin myths, English exceptionalism, and English as God’s chosen heirs—conversations that continue to be crucial within studies of early English literary and political histories. Bringing her work into conversation with recent scholarship on white heritage politics and early English texts would bring a fruitful and necessary dimension to this conversation about power, territory, inheritance, and dissent. Rebel Angels also presents numerous opportunities to examine Satan’s subversion of God’s territorial sovereignty through the lens of queer theory and queer modes of production and creation. Overall, the book will be valuable to any student or scholar researching early English history and religious culture. The close readings of Old English poetry also present valuable insight into literary culture’s interactions with spiritual and secular systems of power and governance.