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ROBERT W. SHAFFERN*
Indulgences, which were (and still are) remissions of temporal penalty for sin granted by the episcopal authority of the Catholic Church, have long been associated with mechanicalism, decadence, and formalism in later medieval Christianity.1 This association originated in the medieval period itself and was, of course, inherited by the Protestant Reformation. Critics such as Jean Gerson (c. 1420) lamented the numbers of indulgences and sizes of the remissions being granted by Christendom's prelates as an attack on true penitence and contrition.2
John Wycliffe (c. 1380) and Wessel Gansfort (c. 1489)3 questioned seriously the Church's authority to remit penalties for sin because indulgences lacked scriptural authority, an argument that may also be found in the earliest discussions of the Schoolmen. Indulgences, however, remained popular throughout the later Middle Ages despite the eloquence and prestige of these critics, and so historians in recent years have begun to examine the popularity of indulgences as a part of medieval spirituality. In a recent study of the relation between papal authority and religious movements, David L. D'Avray argued that the proliferation of indulgences ought more properly to be understood as a religious movement than as a problem within the later medieval church.4 The traditional perspective, in his view, results from "an obtrusive consciousness of the eventual reaction."5 Not only the critics but the enthusiasts must also be heard.
To that end, Richard Kieckhefer expressed the need for historians of medieval religion to explore the connection between saintly piety and indulgences in the Middle Ages.6 The medieval saints, who were the models of late medieval devotion and interior spirituality, were zealous collectors of indulgences. At the same time, the saints accepted the need for ecclesiastical mediation in the remission of sin. Church authority itself relied on the intercession and merit of saints who already possessed their eternal reward. Indeed, in addition to the passion of Christ, the merits of deceased saints were invoked to prove the efficacy of indulgences. Papal proclamations of indulgences often called upon the authority ,of Saints Peter and Paul, the two great patrons of Rome.7 For Catherine of Siena, Bridget of Sweden, Peter of Luxembourg, and others, the quest for indulgences accompanied interior conversion to the imitatio Christi. Indulgences and the saints met in...