The Penitents’ Treasury: Indulgences in Latin Christendom, 1175–1375 (review)

For English-reading medievalists, an accessible modern history of medieval indulgences has long been a desideratum. Robert Shaffern’s volume, following several articles which have considerably advanced appreciation of the role and significance of indulgences in medieval Catholicism, goes far toward its provision.

This is, though, a short book for its subject. Its positive yet measured assessment offers a much-needed corrective to a traditional historiography often tainted by confessional leanings and trapped in the dregs of Reformation debates, but it cannot cover everything. The theoretical evolutions are well covered, but practical experience of the acquisition and distribution of indulgences receives much less attention. Chronologically the book is also limited by its terminal dates. The first appears something of a figment: 1175 has little real significance, and chapter 2, on “The Emergence and Variety of Indulgences,” deals extensively with the eleventh-century origins and the pre-history in earlier penitential regimes. Attempts to push the formal history of indulgences back much before Urban II’s momentous pronouncement at the Council of Clermont in 1095 (whatever he intended it to convey) are shown to be mistaken. The other cut-off date, “1375” (actually 1378 and the outbreak of the Great Schism), is real, and appears somewhat arbitrary—yet avoids the complexities of the last stages of the pre-Reformation history of indulgences.

While “1375” avoids those later issues (including the debate provoked by Wyclif in England in the 1370s and 1380s), they are not totally ignored. The historiographical ghosts of Reformation debates are confronted head-on in the book’s first chapter, an excellent survey of “Indulgences and the Persistent Historiography of Confessional Polemics.” Tracing the rival partisan histories of the past five centuries, this chapter concludes with discussion of more recent “unpolemical” studies and the gradual emergence of a new historiography that reexamines indulgences to relocate them in the history of the medieval Church—a project to which Shaffern’s own volume is a significant contribution.

If Urban II’s Clermont promise added an uncertain gene to the pool that produced later indulgences, other essential ingredients were the consolidation of the ideas of Purgatory and the Treasury of Merits. Chapter 3 concentrates on the treasury and its evolution from c. 1150 through to its formal adoption and promulgation by Pope Clement VI in 1343. Purgatory receives attention in chapter 4, on “Indulgences, the Saints, and Devotionalism at the End of the High Middle Ages.” Here, Shaffern also shows that saints were not as averse to endorsing indulgences as has sometimes been claimed.

The last two chapters turn to “Controversies and indulgences prior to the Great Western Schism.” Chapter 5 examines and dissects uses of the phrase “a pena et culpa” and the vexing issue of the application of indulgences to the dead (a vexation that continued until 1476—far beyond the book’s terminal date). Chapter 6 works in detail through John of Dambach’s wide-ranging tract De quantitate indulgenciarum. Written in defence of the Dominicans and their distribution of indulgences in Germany before 1363, Shaffern identifies it as “the first independent canonistic treatise on indulgences” (p. 179). A short conclusion—“Unde indulgentiae?”—draws together the main strands of arguments that readers unwilling to abandon stereotypes may find scandalously revisionist: “[i]n sum, the traditional interpretation, which depicted pardons as spiritually stultifying, ought now to be laid to rest” (p. 214).

Given the subject’s complexity, and the underappreciated role of indulgences in late-medieval religious life and practice, Shaffern has to condense and select. Despite its brevity, this is a valuable and welcome volume, which fully serves its purpose in providing an up-to-date introduction, offering a balanced judgment, and helping to plug a substantial gap in existing scholarship.