202 Reviews

DAVID KECK, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998. Pp. x, 260 plus 11 black-and white figures. $45.
Neither contemporary historians nor contemporary theologians know or even think much
about angels; whether this neglect is a fault of theologians, it is certainly a mistake for
historians. Angels played an immense role in medieval thought, not only in theology but
also in art, literature, liturgy, drama, and daily life. Aside from art historians, no one has
dealt at length with the history of angelology, and nothing on the scope of Keek's book
had yet appeared. The book is primarily a history of ideas, but part 4, on daily life, main-
tains a grasp of society and even politics. Additionally, given the current number of popular
and often silly books on angels, it is high time a serious treatment of the angels in Hebrew
and Christian thought appeared.
Keck shows great depth in understanding of the subject from the inside: rather than
viewing it as a curious set of phenomena, as an anthropological historian would do, Keck
understands why medieval people took angels so seriously and how they were an integral
part of medieval thought as a whole—though I expected more on poetry especially in
Dante. The author treats the varieties of Western angelology from the Hebrew Bible to the
fourteenth century, correctly observing that (as with the idea of heaven) not much of central
importance was added to the concept afterwards. He correctly observes that taken as a
whole, the great tradition of angelology remains the same throughout the Middle Ages,
but also that a gap separates Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Lombard from the thirteenth-
century Scholastics with their generous use of Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius (p. 20). Keck
is most at home and at his best in discussing thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scholas-
ticism, in whose context he places angelology accurately and thoroughly.
The book is actually both less and more than what Keck claims for it: it is broader than
a theological treatment, yet it is less than a summa of angelology (p. 209). It may be true
that no medieval wrote more about angels than did St. Bonaventure, but Keck partially
eclipses views other than Bonaventure's by making the Seraphic Doctor loom so large. The
author's expressed reasons for doing so (pp. 6, 14, e.g.) are not entirely convincing, al-
though the importance of Franciscan apocalyptic in angelology does make it sensible to
focus on the Franciscan order.
The organization of the book is, especially in part 1, a bit eccentric in imitating Bona-
venture's own plan (in the Breviloquium) of dealing with the Bible in topical sections
(length, depth, and height: p. 12). The organization lends itself more to theological than
to historical sequence. There is little on the role of the fallen angels, little attention to
Eastern Orthodoxy, little (other than on apocalyptic) to dissenting ideas, and too little on
the church fathers and early monastics. On heresies and their repression, Keck should have
relied on Edward Peters rather than on R. I. Moore (p. 158), and he should have paid more
attention to the work of Bernard McGinn and of Caroline (which he persistently misspells
Carolyn) Bynum, but he properly draws fully upon Marcia Colish's contribution to the
subject in her works on Peter Lombard.
As Keck realizes (p. 212), this neglected subject is still a rich field.
JEFFREY BURTON RUSSELL, University of California, Santa Barbara

RICHARD J. KELLY and CIARAN L. QUINN, Stone, Skin, and Silver: A Translation of "The
Dream of the Rood." Midleton, Co. Cork, Ireland: Litho Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 125; 8
black-and-white figures, 4 tables, and 24 black-and-white and color plates. IR£34.95
(cloth); IR£19.95 (paper).
The goal of this book is laudable. Kelly and Quinn seek to provide texts and translations
not only of The Dream of the Rood but of the related Ruthwell Cross and Brussels Cross