ABSTRACT
Attention to pastoral duties as bishop of Rome was a constant feature of the pontificates from 1564 to 1789. Thus the conspicuous pastoral preoccupations of the late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century popes, from Innocent XI to Benedict XIII in particular, were not an innovation but the resumption of a priority evident immediately after the Council of Trent and even into the first half of the seventeenth century. Pius IV had promised critics at the Council who denounced Curial abuses that reform of the papal Court would be pur sued by the direct action of the pope himself. Reform of the papal household, and of the Roman Court more generally, was indeed implemented, as by his suc cessors Pius V and Sixtus V for instance, and such programmes were renewed at the start of later pontificates such as those, once again, of Innocent XI and Benedict XIII. But in a way more important, for the evidence it gave of serious commitment to the ideal of Tridentine reform, based on the diocesan model, was the repeated intervention of popes to improve the life of the Roman diocese itself, beyond the confines of the Court, in the city and its rural margins.
