Repository | Book | Chapter

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther addressed a letter to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, enclosing his 95 Theses, with their challenge to the Roman Church's cult of indulgences.² While his posting of the theses on the door of the Schloßkirche³ had perhaps more symbolic impact, Luther's invitation to the supranational scholarly community to a disputation on the doctrine of indulgences⁴ was indeed construed as an attack on the papacy by at least some of his respondents.⁵ The Church had long offered indulgences—remission of temporal punishment for sin granted for specific good works and prayers, drawing on the treasury of merit laid up by Christ's sacrifice—but by the early sixteenth century the practice had become a widespread, unabashed, and much-abused fundraising technique.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137344168_9

Full citation: