The date which most commonly serves to mark the beginning of the Reformation is that of the publication of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses concerning indulgences. The occasion for Luther's formulation of his theses was a campaign to raise funds by preaching an indulgence in the ecclesiastical provinces of Mainz and Magdeburg and the territories of the house of Brandenburg. The proceeds of the indulgence were to be divided between the building of the new St Peter's at Rome, and defraying the costs of the papal dispensation acquired by Albrecht of Brandenburg to hold the archbishoprics of Mainz and Magdeburg simultaneously. It is appropriate that the five-hundredth anniversary of these events should be marked by a substantial volume of essays on indulgences. It appears just two years after the conference from which it derives, which took place at the German Historical Institute and the Facoltà Valdese di Teologia in Rome.

There are thirty contributions of a uniformly high standard. All of them concern indulgences, but not all of them concern indulgence campaigns. After the editor's introduction, they are divided into seven sections, but the contents of these to some extent overlap and I will ignore them for the purposes of this review. The volume begins with contributions which are of wide scope: Robert Swanson on ‘The challenges of indulgences’, Cardinal Koch's introduction to the theology of indulgences, Arnold Angenendt on the historical development of indulgences, and Philippe Cordez on indulgences and alms (curiously, this is a translation into Italian of a chapter of his book Schatz, Gedächtnis, Wunder of 2015).

Thomas M. Izbicki considers the power of general councils to grant indulgences and papal reactions to conciliar claims, Diego Quaglioni the controversy surrounding Clement vi’s constitution Unigenitus. Papal licences which allowed their beneficiaries to choose a private confessor are discussed by the late Andreas Meyer with reference to the papal chancery and by Ludwig Schmugge with reference to the penitentiary (some licences permitted the confessor to grant a plenary indulgence at the point of death). Three contributors discuss the religious orders as promoters of indulgences: Karl Borchardt on the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Order, Andreas Rehberg on the Order of the Holy Spirit, and Robert Shaffern on the Mendicants. Further essays concern particular regions or places: indulgence campaigns in the territories of the house of Wettin, electors and dukes of Saxony (Peter Wiegand), and indulgences in the diocese of Meissen (Enno Bünz), for the church of Most (Brüx) in Bohemia (Jan Hrdina), and for two bridges over the Rhône (Daniel Le Blévec). There are two essays about Italy: Roberto Rusconi, ‘Predicazione penitenziale, ascolto delle confessioni e prassi indulgenziali: Italia, 1470 ca. – 1520 ca.’, and Anna Esposito on confraternities. The quaestores or ‘pardoners’ who preached and publicised indulgences and who collected the offerings of the faithful feature prominently in the volume; Arnold Esch studies the travels of one of them, Angelo de’ Cialfi in 1470–2. The new medium of printing made possible the publication of indulgences on a massive scale. Falk Eisermann surveys recent scholarship on printed indulgences. Harmut Kühne discusses the various means by which awareness of them was disseminated in ‘Ablassvermittlung und Ablassmedien um 1500’, and Nine Mediema considers indulgences in the pilgrim guide known as Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae.

Pavel Soukup reminds us that Luther's most successful forerunner, Jan Hus, was involved in a debate about indulgences at the university of Prague in 1412. This essay prefaces a series of contributions concerning Luther's own ideas. Berndt Hamm's thought-provoking essay argues for a ‘surprising convergence’ between the theology of the indulgence and the Luther's theology of grace. The convergence will be less surprising to readers of the author's Ablass und Reformation of 2016, for the essay is a reprint of the final chapter of that book, as the author informs us. Volker Leppin considers Luther's opposition to indulgences in the context of his theology of penitence and Lothar Vogel the idea of purgatory in the Ninety-Five Theses. Wilhelm Ernst Winterhager traces the progress of the indulgence for St Peter's basilica in central and northern Europe. ‘Northern Europe’ includes Scandinavia but not England. This is a pity, for the author would doubtless have appreciated the irony that in England the proceeds of the indulgence were divided equally between St Peter's and the Augustinian friars, Luther's own order (W. E. Lunt, Financial relations of the papacy with England, 1327–1534, Cambridge, Ma 1962, 610). The response to the theses is the subject of essays by Peter Walter (for the university of Frankfurt an der Oder and Rome) and Elizabeth Tingle (for France).

The volume concludes with a summary, by Peter Walter, of an interdenominational discussion of the impact of Luther's criticism of indulgences on contemporary theology and ecumenical dialogue, which gives the impression that deep divisions remain. This may be one of the reasons why two participants suggested the abandonment of the term indulgence altogether (pp. 681, 683-4) – and this despite the clear and concise definition of the term given by the editor at the outset as the remission of the temporal penalties of sin under certain conditions (p. ix). It might be added that these penalties took the form of penance in this life or a period in purgatory in the next, and an indulgence might lessen both. This point deserves emphasis, for two of the contributors speak of indulgences as applying only to purgatory (see pp. 7, 60; cf. pp. 142 n. 85, 196).

The attitude of the secular authorities to indulgence campaigns and their involvement in them receive due weight in this volume. This is one of the many different perspectives from which it is possible to study indulgences, and even a work of the length of the present volume cannot hope to cover all of them. Apart from some passages in Leppin's accomplished essay, the university context of Luther's theses receives relatively little attention, and it would have been helpful to have an account of contemporary university disputations, in Wittenberg and elsewhere. Although occasional use is made of visual evidence, the absence of any art-historical essays is striking. But even without covering these topics, the volume represents an indispensable contribution to the study of indulgence campaigns, of indulgences in general and of Luther's Reformation.