None of the medievals would have been dumb enough to ask how many pure spirits could dance on a head of a pin. Like much other folklore about the Middle Ages, this is almost certainly early modern propaganda.
> The libel about angels on the heads of pins seems to be of comparatively recent invention. I have not been able to find it in any author before Erasmus Darwin (who was late enough to have written, in his Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, on the prospects for the spread of civilisation to New South Wales), though one might suspect the Encyclopedists or Rabelais as more likely originators of the idea. [Update] No medieval writer has been exhibited who engaged in such a dispute, for the good reason that there was none.
> The libel about angels on the heads of pins seems to be of comparatively recent invention. I have not been able to find it in any author before Erasmus Darwin (who was late enough to have written, in his Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, on the prospects for the spread of civilisation to New South Wales), though one might suspect the Encyclopedists or Rabelais as more likely originators of the idea. [Update] No medieval writer has been exhibited who engaged in such a dispute, for the good reason that there was none.
https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/renaissance.html