The materiality of Turku Cathedral’s spiritual treasury: Indulgences

Abstract

The article discusses indulgences as an instrument that provided the spiritual treasury of the Church with a material manife­station. We propose that indulgences reflected the Divine within the material world in four different ways: 1) by promoting particular locations as sources of divine grace; 2) by promoting the cult of saints and their relics; 3) by generating donations for the construction and renovation of churches, and 4) by being in themselves – as indulgence letters and their copies preserved in chartularies – material evidence of the Church’s spiritual treasury. Therefore, indulgences must be taken into account in scholarly discussion of Christian materiality. We explore the four material aspects of indulgences through the evidence from Turku Cathedral from the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century.