ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implementation of Catholic reform in Italy, France and the Netherlands in the early modern period. It deals with the integration of reformed Catholicism with cultures, and especially with popular culture, and also with the question of the adaptation of the reinvigorated Catholicism that had been devised in the course of the sixteenth century to national and regional traditions and identities and to vernacular cultures. The chapter considers reconciliation between popular demands for the continuance of therapeutic and magic-centred religion and the spiritualising, anti-magical trends and opposition to local religion found in Tridentine Catholicity, especially amongst the upper and seminary-trained clergy. In the immediate post-Tridentine period the emergent ‘doyen of the Venetian episcopate’ was Agostino Valier, bishop of Verona from 1565 to 1606. A further religious field in which the Venetian state of which Verona was a part retained its distinctiveness while accepting Tridentine reform was that of piety.
