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Training City Magistrates to Become Trustworthy Men. A Comparative Look at Italian and Dutch Mirrors-for-Magistrates through a Political Trust Perspective
Abstract Political trust is high on the public agenda nowadays. The interdisciplinary study of this topic is also booming. Historians have, however, been largely absent from this debate. This contribution seeks to participate in this discussion and to add to the historical exploration of political trust. To this end, it will focus on a specific group of trustworthy men, i. e. medieval city magistrates, and a particular set of sources, namely eight Dutch and Italian didactic texts on city government targeted at these men (1220s–1350s). More precisely, this article will highlight the key building blocks of the trust-building message embedded in these mirrors-for-magistrates and will also discuss the spatio-temporal variation of this message across the corpus.
