The opening of the Vatican Archives in 1881 made most records of the papal curia accessible to qualified researchers, but it was not till 1983, a century later, that Pope John Paul ii opened the archives of the Apostolic Penitentiary. This curial office was the highest body in the later medieval Church concerned with matters of sin and conscience, and even now access to and publication of its records remain subject to the modern office’s approval. A pioneer in making its records more widely available and known to scholars is Professor Ludwig Schmugge. He led a major project to edit all petitions from the German empire recorded in the office’s registers between 1431 and 1523, resulting in fourteen impressive volumes published between 1996 and 2018. Arnold Esch, as director of the Deutsches Historisches Institut (DHI) Rom, supported this Repertorium Poenitentiare Germanicum as a DHI project, and it has inspired similar regional editions of penitentiary sources. For the past thirty years both historians have published widely on the significance of penitentiary sources for religious, social and cultural history, so it is fitting that they should collaborate on this volume which usefully collects a selection of such scholarship. It demonstrates the value of these sources for a wide variety of historical topics and questions, ranging through marriage, religious dissent and medicine to the global expansion of European power.

Following an introduction by Tobias Daniels explaining the nature of the sources and growth of historiography on the penitentiary, the book is divided into two halves, comprising eleven essays by Schmugge and nine by Esch. After an essay written for the volume contextualising the development of the penitentiary in the growth of canon law and papal authority from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, Schmugge’s contribution begins by exploring medical history. He notes that the late fifteenth-century penitentiary dispensed physicians from papal bans on human dissection, letting them pursue anatomical research. Indeed, as he explains, the curia’s licensing of medical study at university increasingly led the office to value medical opinion in its decision-making, especially relaxing fasting rules on health grounds for petitioners citing medical advice, and exonerating clergy implicated in homicide cases where medical experts determined that victims died from another cause, even medical malpractice. Schmugge also shows the value of penitentiary sources for intellectual and university history more generally, notably for prosopography of alumni. The office granted study leave to beneficed clergy and religious, notably when their superiors had refused or they aspired to study subjects normally forbidden to them, such as Roman law. Penitentiary sources even give insights into the social life of students, especially those caught up in ‘town and gown’ violence.

Schmugge further illustrates how penitentiary sources can illuminate religious attitudes and popular piety before and during the Reformation in Germany. For example, he discusses two cases of women who died in childbirth and how this raised the problem of burying them with stillborn children whose souls were notionally bound for Limbo, much debated by canonists. He likewise notes evidence of inquisitorial activity in late fifteenth-century Augsburg, where a parish priest’s daily mass celebration raised suspicions about his orthodoxy, doubtless since its frequency was deemed indicative of ‘utraquism’ and thus Hussitism. Schmugge has noted evidence of heresy and Lutheranism elsewhere in penitentiary records, and here he speculates on whether Luther had contact with the penitentiary when visiting Rome in 1510–11, notably to seek a study licence.Footnote ¹ He also notes that by the 1520s German clergy, notably in Augsburg diocese, sought absolution from the penitentiary for holding and preaching Lutheran opinions and reading Lutheran books; other petitions indicate the spread of Lutheranism, notably those from mendicants seeking to leave houses allegedly tainted by Lutheranism.

Schmugge’s contribution concludes with essays on marriage and papal Jubilees. The former stresses the need to combine penitentiary sources with local records, notably marriage cases before local church courts, a point made in his book on the penitentiary and marriage; this is especially relevant to retrospective dispensations for clandestine marriages (often the subject of litigation).Footnote ² He also notes that penitentiary petitions, notably concerning marriage, peaked in the 1450 and 1475 Jubilees, which serves as an index of pilgrims visiting Rome then, who doubtless presented petitions for themselves and others. Tellingly, German petitions in those years mostly came from regions which remained Catholic after the later rise of Lutheranism. Schmugge further notes a case of a Cologne merchant who sought a penitentiary declaration that his proxy marriage to a Cypriot woman was invalid since it was contracted under duress in a trade deal with Cyprus. This illustrates growing Western trade contacts beyond Europe, a phenomenon explored more extensively by Esch.

The key theme of Esch’s contribution is how penitentiary sources shed light on ‘little people’ involved in big historical events. His opening essay demonstrates this well with examples of petitioners present at the Fall of Constantinople and at other conflicts in England, France, Iberia and Italy. He notes in another essay that some petitioners were religious participating in such warfare contrary to canonical prohibitions; Rabelais’s monk-soldier was no satirical invention since some of these religious even confessed to abandoning their habits to run away to the army. Other essays investigate more peaceful European contacts with the wider world. One regards female petitioners vowing to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, who sought licences to have contact with Muslims contrary to canon law, or commutation of their vows on grounds of poverty, old age or infirmity. Papal bans on Christian contact with Muslims largely forbade export of war materials that might aid Muslim resistance to crusades in Iberia and the East. Hence another essay shows that Christian merchants trading illicitly with Muslims, notably in North Africa, petitioned the penitentiary for absolution, and even for their forced conversion in Muslim captivity or mixed marriages to Muslim women. Furthermore, Esch explores early evidence of Portuguese expansion into the African maritime world and the Atlantic, especially clergy petitioning from Portuguese colonies on West African islands and in the Maghreb.

Like Schmugge, Esch also notes penitentiary evidence regarding heresy: the remarkable case of a bodyguard of Alexander vi defending himself against the Spanish Inquisition’s charge of relapsing into non-Christian beliefs. In other essays Esch shows how penitentiary sources can illuminate social and cultural history. For example, some petitions described games, including football, mock-fighting, even dice and card games. Some clerical petitioners mentioned these as contexts for fatalities, from which they sought absolution or exoneration; incidental details in such petitions afford vivid insights into everyday life. Other petitions shed light upon food culture, especially those seeking relaxation of fasting rules. One of the common grounds for this concession was the unavailability of substitutes for forbidden foods, especially oil to replace butter. Petitioners north of the Alps often cited the scarcity and cost of olive oil, which had to be imported from Italy; some also claimed to find oil, even made locally from nuts or linseed, unpalatable. Finally, Esch notes examples of everyday speech in penitentiary petitions which otherwise comprise formulaic language; the proctors drawing up the petitions clearly derived these informal expressions from petitioners, and they afford insights into demotic speech.

The sources analysed here date from the fifteenth to early sixteenth century, for which the earliest penitentiary registers of petitions survive, and thus documents the transition from medieval to early modern: what some historians call the Renaissance period. This is evident notably in the essays above concerning the developments of Lutheranism and medical science, and Western expansion, travel and trade beyond Europe. Hence this volume, especially given its diverse coverage, should widely interest scholars and students of medieval and early modern history, especially those seeking exciting new sources. With this potentially international audience in mind, an English translation of the essays might have been published rather than a reprint of the German originals, such as Wolfgang Müller produced for Brigide Schwarz’s essays on the late medieval papal curia.Footnote ³ Nevertheless, Schmugge and Esch’s essays are introduced here by English abstracts and often followed by editions of Latin penitentiary sources, which should whet the appetite of readers with limited German to explore the penitentiary sources further, especially those edited in the monumental Repertorium Poenitentiare Germanicum.