Acknowledgements
This edition owes its inception to a knock on my office door some three years ago. A young gentleman entered and introduced himself as Martin Weibelzahl, noting that, while he was an operations researcher in the mathematics department in Erlangen, he had studied Latin intensively in school, and wanted to see if there was a way to combine both interests. In particular, he asked if I might be interested in a project exploring the economic effects of papal indulgences on Germany. I agreed that this might well be worth while pursuing and suggested that we rope in the reigning economist on the Erlangen faculty, Jürgen Kähler, who quickly agreed to take part. We originally hoped to drum up enough empirical evidence to be able to compare the receipts from the indulgence campaigns which were transferred to Rome to contemporary German GDP and assess the economic effects of these flows of funds. We quickly determined that, while there was much evidence for the receipts from this or that collection in a particular town in a given year, there was no hope of coming up with an overall figure, either for transfers to Rome or for German GDP in the late middle ages. Therefore, we shifted our focus to the money the church charged individual penitents for obtaining various graces in the course of the indulgence campaigns, culminating in the St Peter Indulgence which provided funding for building St Peter’s in Rome (and was Luther’s target in 1517). Being the economic dunce in the class, it fell to my lot to collect this evidence. I quickly determined that this was going to be a tall order. The scholarly literature, largely authored by church historians, was frustratingly vague about how much money the church charged penitents for indulgences. Worse yet, it proved impossible to reconstruct, on the basis of existing scholarship, which particular spiritual benefits were on offer in a given campaign or, indeed, when the individual campaigns began and ended. Astonishingly, there was not even a scholarly consensus on so a simple matter as a chronological list of indulgence campaigns.
So it was back to the sources with a vengeance. Here, again, frustration was the rule rather than the exception. As explained in the introduction, most of the relevant papal bulls were not available in any modern edition, the exception being Fredericq’s Codex documentorum sacratissimarum indulgentiarum neerlandicarum which, however, was narrowly focussed on the Low Countries. The instructions to the sub-commissioners, preachers and father confessors who were in charge of local arrangements were, in all but a handful of cases, only available in early printings. Hence, the idea of collecting and transcribing the relevant documents began to form in my mind, and this led rapidly enough to the idea that it would be useful to publish these sources if I was going to go to the work of transcribing them.
Three ongoing projects have made this Sisyphean task a good deal easier than it was in Fredericq’s day. The first is the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrücke (Union Catalogue of Incunabula), which with unceasing labor is engaged in exhaustively cataloguing all books, pamphlets and broadsides published in Europe before 1500. The second is the British Library’s Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, which provides a brilliantly intuitive interface to the Gesamtkatalog, allowing even the most untutored researcher instantly to access the Gesamtkatalog’s detailed descriptions of early printings and to follow the links to images of the sources on the web. The third is the magnificent project of the Bavarian State Library in Munich (financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to photograph every publication in its extensive holdings which appeared before 1800 and to place the images on the web. This allowed me not only to transcribe most sources for the edition from digital photographs, but also to chase down obscure references in eighteenth-century editions (e.g. Amort, De origine (1735), citing ex Bzovio) and consult the works they referenced (namely the early seventeenth-century printing of Raynaldus’ Annales ecclesie) on the Bavarian State Library’s website. Best of all, these three projects are interlinked, so that whenever digital images of a pre-1500 publication are put on the Bavarian State Library’s website, they are instantly linked through to the Gesamtkatalog and the ISTC.
So my first vote of thanks is to Jürgen and Martin for bearing with me and keeping my nose to the grindstone. My thanks also go to the unsung scholars and librarians who, for more than a century, have painstakingly catalogued incunabula for the Gesamtkatalog, to the web designers at the British Library and to the photographers and web designers of the Bavarian State Library.
Heartfelt thanks are also due to Falk Eisermann (Prussian State Library in Berlin) for very useful advice about early printing and the ins and outs of the Gesamtkatalog, to Bruce C. Barker-Benfield (Department of Special Collections & Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford) for sniffing out the manuscript source of Martin V’s Pia mater ecclesia, to Robert Swanson (Birmingham) for midwifing some useful contacts and to David d’Avray (University College London) for sage advice about church history, especially in penitential matters, and for much-needed and highly useful emergency copy editing of the Brief Guide and the Conclusion. Thanks are also due to Otto Ottens (Stadsarchief Kampen) and Christoph Meyer (MPI Vergleichende Rechtsgeschichte, Frankfurt) for their help. Finally, Brill’s anomymous external referee saved me from some grievous errors.
All remaining errors are mine and mine alone.