ABSTRACT
In his art history film series, Civilisation, in the 1970s, the late Kenneth Clark (seliger gedechtnis) spoke of the great creative exuberance of Western Europe beginning in the eleventh century and culminating in the thirteenth. He referred, of course, to art and architecture; but in many other spheres of cultural and economic life, Europeans were indeed astir. Theology was no exception. Precisely in these times the precepts and practices that would typify late medieval Catholic Christianity matured and took their characteristic pre-Reformation forms. There emerged a system of penitential doctrines, from requisite auricular confession through purgatory, indulgences, and the Treasury of Merit to vicarious satisfaction for sin-in short, many of those allegedly non-biblical teachings to which Martin Luther and the other Reformers so vehemently objected.1
