Originally published in German in 2016, Indulgences and the Reformation investigates the shifts in the theology of indulgence leading up to the sixteenth-century German Reformation. Rather than seeing the Reformation message of grace as an abrupt departure, noted Reformation scholar Berndt Hamm demonstrates that the Reformation takes place at the end of an extended process of making grace more accessible to the faithful.
Importantly, this book is the first to investigate the topic of indulgence by relying primarily on indulgence literature and not on the--usually negative--evaluations of indulgence propagated by reformational authors. The book identifies numerous axes of development within indulgence theology and then demonstrates how the Wittenberg Reformation both completed and destroyed the logic of indulgence. A central observation pertains to how the logic of partial indulgences (a finite amount of time off from purgatory in exchange for a certain fee or service) is challenged and gradually replaced by the increasing frequency of plenary indulgences (complete liberation from the punishment of purgatory) in the two centuries prior to the Reformation. This evolution went hand in hand with a revised theology of penance that enabled the total grace of plenary indulgence to be attained multiple times over the course of a person's life. Such developments in theological understandings of indulgence ultimately made the Reformation's message of total grace, attained solely through faith in Jesus Christ, plausible to late-medieval believers.
