The Penitents' Treasury: Indulgences in Latin Christendom, 1175-1375

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. 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.