[See also: JEHAN BONNET: MATFRE ERMENGAUD; SIDRAC, ROMAN DE]
Langlois, Charles-Victor. La vie en France au moyen âge, du XIIe au milieu du XIVe siècle. 4 vols.
Paris: Hachette, 1925–28, Vol. 3: La connaissance de la nature et du monde, pp. 135–97.
INDULGENCES
. Ecclesiastical actions, usually papal or episcopal, granting full or partial remission of the
temporal punishment (poena), but not the guilt (culpa), due to sins. Indulgences appear in
the 11th century, become prominent in the 12th, and thereafter form an important part of
medieval religious belief and practice. The substitution of a lighter penance (prayers,
almsgiving) for a longer or more severe penance can be found in the Carolingian period
and even earlier, but this is not the equivalent of an indulgence, which frees a person
from the temporal punishment required after confession of sin and priestly absolution.
The first widespread papal grants of indulgences occurred in connection with the
Crusades. When calling for the First Crusade in 1095, Pope Urban II declared an
indulgence granting full forgiveness (hence a “plenary indulgence”) of all temporal
punishment for all crusaders who confessed their sins. This had the effect of declaring
that a knight who died on crusade would enter Heaven immediately after death, since he
would have no temporal penance to carry out.
By the early 13th century, a plenary indulgence could be gained by contributing
money, or even advice, toward the Crusades. Somewhat later, papal decrees allowed
individuals to purchase letters allowing a confessor to grant the individual possessing the
letter a plenary indulgence at the point of death. By the 14th century, it was possible to
obtain a letter authorizing even a layperson to read a formula that decreed forgiveness of
punishment and guilt (at the point of death).
Not all indulgences were full; many offered forgiveness of a finite time of punishment
measured in days or in years. Such indulgences might be gained by going on pilgrimage,
contributing to church building, attending a church dedication, visiting a shrine at a
specific festival, building bridges, and the like. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
sought to limit the extent of the forgiveness granted by such indulgences, but the
tendency was to expand the occasions for granting and the length of penitential time
forgiven.
The 14th century saw the development of plenary papal indulgences in connection
with specific years for pilgrimage to Rome (“Jubilee Years”). Boniface VIII decreed a
plenary indulgence for all Christians who confessed their sins and made pilgrimage to the
churches of the Apostles in Rome in the year 1300 (and every hundred years thereafter).
Clement VI shortened the interval between Jubilee Years to fifty, while also predicating
the papal grant of indulgences on the idea of the “Treasury of Merits” of Christ, whose
sacrificial death provided a superabundance of merits that were to be dispensed to the
faithful through the authority of the pope, as God’s vicar on earth, in granting full and
partial indulgences. The Dominican theologian Hugues de Saint-Cher had already linked
indulgences to the theory of a “treasury of merits” built up through the merits of Christ,
the Virgin Mary, and the saints and administered by the church. Urban VI, in 1389,
The Encyclopedia 901