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Introduction
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INTRODUCTION The Apostolic Penitentiary and its role in, and for, late medieval society may be seen as one of the best examples of how specific local needs of clerics and laity of all social origins, and global authority, in this case the pope, was connected and interdependent. For a variety of reasons, individual Christians requested grace from the Papal Curia, the Penitentiary in particular, which could not be given by others, neither by representatives of secular authority nor by any other members of the Church hierarchy. The central authority of the papacy determined and influenced not only matters of faith, but also the life of any late medieval Christian – to judge, punish, and absolve. The present volume is a continuation of the international studies of the late medieval registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary. In particular, it may be seen as a cooperative initiative of researchers from the Centre of Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen, the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University (Budapest ), and the Department of History of the University of Tampere.1 In the course of this initiative, a workshop entitled “The Apostolic Penitentiary in Local Contexts” was organised in June, 2005, at the Hungarian Academy in Rome. This book is one of the outcomes of this meeting. It aims at investigating the fifteenth-century registers of supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary, and analysing examples out of the multiplicity of issues in which this context of local needs and universal power occurred. Most of the following articles concentrate on aspects of “global” and “local” interaction with regard to the institutions and archives offering information about the individual cases and their handling. This can be seen in the case for Upper Italy in the contribution by Paolo Ostinelli, who highlights cases from this region and addresses their occurrence in the Penitentiary registers as well as in the source evidence found in local archives. Torstein Jørgensen shows the intensive connection of the global Church authority and local issues on the basis of a model of centre and periphery that he applies 1 For previous results of this cooperation, see The Long Arm of Papal Authority. Late Medieval Christian Peripheries and Their Communication with the Holy See, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, Torstein Jørgensen and Kirsi Salonen, 2nd ed. (Budapest:: CEU Press, 2005). INTRODUCTION 2 to Scandinavian cases. He demonstrates that ecclesiastical law codes touching the lives of individuals also reached the peripheral and northernmost province of the Roman church, that is, the archdiocese of Nidaros (= Trondheim), which included Norway, Iceland and North Atlantic islands. The global and local contexts that the registers of the Penitentiary point to are approached particularly with reference to three areas: ‘marriage and sexual conduct’, ‘vagrants and apostates’, and problems that the church policy was confronted with in certain territories. In all of them a variety of interconnections and dependencies can be shown. Jennifer McDonald studies illegitimate Scots who were seeking assistance from the Papal Curia during the pontificate of Pope Sixtus IV. She demonstrates a number of varieties concerning their treatment in the respective different register series preserved in the Vatican Archives and connects them with the social origin of the petitioners. Kirsi Salonen offers a case study about a particular case of marriage litigation in the Consistorial Court of the diocese of Freising. She demonstrates to what extent the information that local source material offers about an individual case may add to the surviving records in the Penitentiary registers. Meanwhile, Ana Marinković analyses the references to papal dispensations in the notarial registers of matrimonial contracts which survive in the archives of Dubrovnik. The matrimonial dispensations and their reference to impotence is the topic of Ludwig Schmugge’s contribution. Concentrating on an Italian and a German case, he compares the appearance of impotence in canon law with its occurrence in the registers of the Penitentiary. The articles of Gerhard Jaritz and Milena Svec Goetschi concentrate on the supplications from vagrant monks and apostates in the Penitentiary registers. Gerhard Jaritz addresses the source evidence from the dioceses of Salzburg and Passau. He compares the quality and quantity of the discourse about vagrants in the Penitentiary registers with the sources of the Orders and evidence originating from individual monastic houses. Milena Svec Goetschi, on the other hand, studies the supplications of a Premonstratensian canon who had escaped from his monastery in the diocese of Constance and joined mercenary troops. ‘Local needs in threatened lands’ and their contexts within the evidence contained in the registers...