A Sip from the “Well of Grace”: Medieval Texts from the Apostolic Penitentiary (review)

Those interested in the history of the late-medieval and Renaissance papacy will be delighted to add this little book to their collection of scholarly readings. Published as a paperback, it is highly affordable, richly illustrated, and written by two authors whose expertise in the matter is unparalleled. Kirsi Salonen and Ludwig Schmugge, residents of Rome, have spent more than a decade in the Vatican Secret Archives to study the fifteenth-century registers of the Sacra Penitentiaria Apostolica, the Supreme Court of Penance in Latin Christendom. What they have found is conveniently summarized and translated into English here. Their treatment starts with an introduction (pp. 1–105) to the administrative workings and documentary output of the institution, captured statistically through the years from 1455 to 1492 (table 1; p. 19), for which the surviving run of registers is nearly complete. The second part of the book (pp. 108–88) examines the nature of the registered material. It consists of papal licenses, indulgences, absolutions, and dispensations, each permitting individual petitioners to depart from the general canonical rule. During the previously mentioned period, the Penitentiary granted, for example, a total of 42,691 (registered) dispensations from marriage impediments, nearly 4,000 of them to residents of the British Isles. More than 16,000 overall were concerned with illegitimate birth. Data such as these reveal that social and legal historians must take this relatively new source, accessible to a small number of scholars since 1983, very seriously. In addition, Salonen and Schmugge have extended their coverage to local archives, where many letters alluded to in the registers are still preserved.

The authors have been extremely judicious in their selective criteria, limiting the bibliography (pp. 189–92) to essentials and restricting their analysis to mechanisms immediately responsible for the production of “medieval texts from the Apostolic Peniteniary.” In this way, they have provided a reliable point of departure for interpretive studies, which remain in full swing and without sufficient consensus. Second, I was glad to encounter in the companion CD-Rom a splendid digital color version of the Litera Ecclesie handed out in 1449 to Nanne, a Swedish layman from the Diocese of Skara (illustration 1; also printed in grayscale on p. 165). Nanne, who confessed unspecified sins to a papal penitentiarius in Rome, received the Litera as written evidence of his absolution. Once the ordinary bishop at home had seen the Litera, it was normally discarded. This did not occur in Nanne’s case, making the document the sole known representative of its kind. Because it records a process under the sacramental seal of secrecy, it tracks a type of penitential transaction excluded from the apostolic registers. Historians of the Middle Ages, paleographers, and students of diplomatics are in for a treat.