Promissary Notes on the Treasury of Merits offers an important selection of work on a neglected topic of medieval European religious history. The contributions clearly demonstrate the vibrant, multi-faceted, and at times contested, role which indulgences played in many aspects of medieval catholic life.

Using hitherto unconsidered source materials from late antiquity to the early modern period, this volume charts new views about the role of penance in shaping western attitudes and practices for resolving social, political, and spiritual tensions, as penitents and confessors negotiated rituals and expectations for penitential expression.

At the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and the dawn of the Protestant movement, Indulgences: Luther, Catholicism, and the Imputation of Merit sets forth a revised theological interpretation of the Church’s practice of indulgences. Author Mary C. Moorman argues that Luther’s sola fide theology merely absolutized the very logic of indulgences which he sought to overthrow, while indulgences in their proper context remain an irreducible witness to the Church’s corporate nuptial covenant with Christ, by which penitents are drawn into deeper fellowship with the Church and the Church’s Lord. As Robert W. Shaffern, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Scranton, writes in his foreword to Indulgences, “Mary Moorman’s book joins a number of recent scholarly studies that revise substantially the old convictions about indulgences. She is mostly interested in how theological thinking about indulgences should be done today, with of course the help that patristic, medieval, and early modern authorities might lend. She brings to bear a broad range of primary and secondary sources on the issue of indulgences and constructs an impressive series of covalent images with which to understand the role of indulgences in today’s Christian Church.”

The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history and how the uses of their bodies in Christian thought led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims—martyrs, mystics, and heretics—as substitutes for the Christian social body. These victims secured holiness, either by their own sacred power or by their reprobation and rejection. Just as their bodies were mediated in eucharistic, social, and Christological ways, so too did the flesh of Jesus Christ become one of those holy substitutes. But it was only late in Western history that he took on the function of the exemplary victim. In tracing the story of this embodied development, The Body of the Cross gives special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women throughout Christian history. It examines the symbol of the cross as it functions in key moments throughout this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval affective devotion and heresy. Finally, in a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated in the unique concept that Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin: a holy body and a rejected body in one.

What defined the crusades in contrast to other wars was the opportunity for warriors to win a spiritual reward, the indulgence. In The Crusade Indulgence. Spiritual Rewards and the Theology of the Crusades, c. 1095-1216 Ane L. Bysted examines the theological and institutional development of the indulgence from the proclamation of the First Crusade to Pope Innocent III. This first comprehensive study of crusade indulgences in more than a hundred years challenges some earlier interpretations and demonstrates how theologians, popes, and crusade preachers in the 12th century formed the concept of indulgences and argued that fighting for Christ and the Church was meritorious in the sight of God and thus worthy of a spiritual reward proclaimed by the Church

Indulgences have been synonymous with corruption in the Catholic Church ever since Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. Tingle explores the nature and evolution of indulgences in the Counter Reformation and how they were used as a powerful tool of personal and institutional reform.

Remembered as the official who failed to keep Luther in the Catholic fold, Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan (1469-1534) was a multi-faceted figure whose significance extends beyond those days in Augsburg. In the 1520s, he embarked on a labour of biblical commentary that occupied the final decade of his life, producing over a million words of translation and commentary. Offering an overview of this remarkable body of work, Michael O’Connor argues that Cajetan’s motive was the renewal of Christian living (more ‘Catholic Reform’ than ‘Counter-Reformation’), and that his method was a bold and fresh hybrid of scholasticism and Renaissance humanism, correcting the Vulgate’s errors and expounding the text almost exclusively according to the literal sense.