Trust in the Catholic Reformation

In Trust in the Catholic Reformation, Therese Peeters shows how trust and distrust affected reform attempts in the post-Tridentine Church, while offering a multifaceted account of day-to-day religiosity in seventeenth-century Genoa, a city that has largely been overlooked in Anglophone scholarship. The book addresses diverse aspects of early modern Catholicism among lay people and members of the clergy. The author replaces the traditional view of the Catholic Reformation as a top-down process with one that considers individual agency, highlighting how strategies for gaining and maintaining trust - as well as the processes by which trust could be lost or denied - determined the success or failure of various efforts at reforming the Church.