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Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe. Edited by R. N. Swanson. [Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition, Vol. 5.] (Leiden: Brill. 2006. Pp. xii, 360. $124.00; euro95,00.)
Since indulgences were arguably the keystone of later medieval religious practice and certainly at the heart of Luther's attack on the entire penitential and sacramental system, it is odd indeed that they have not elicited more systematic attention from scholars. The standard work, R. N. Swanson says, remains Nikolaus Paulus' three-volume Geschichte des Ablasses im Mittelalter, originally published in 1922-23 and reprinted in 2000, and recently supplemented in part by the study of collective indulgences by Alexander Siebold, Sammelindulgenzen. Ablassurkunden des Spätmittelalters und der Frühneuzeit (2001). This is not quite correct, for if one consults the germane bibliographical entry in the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (1997), one encounters such formidable names as Henry Charles Lea, Bernhard Poschmann, and Karl Rahner; yet it remains true that in the last half-century or so indulgences have not loomed as large as one might expect, partly perhaps because so many great scholars have gone before.
To remedy this defect, therefore, Swanson, a distinguished scholar of late medieval religion, has assembled this collection of thirteen highly diverse essays to which he has provided a succinct, if incomplete, introduction (pp. 1-9). The authors and their contributions are as follows: Robert Shaffern, "The Medieval Theology of Indulgences" (pp. 11-36); Giovanna Casagrande, "Confraternities and Indulgences in Italy in the Later Middle Ages" (pp. 37-63); Charles Caspers, "Indulgences in the Low Countries, c. 1300-c. 1520" (pp. 65-99); Eva Dolezalova et al., "The Reception and Criticism of Indulgences in the Late Medieval Czech Lands"...