Everything you know about this is entirely wrong, and it’s just getting worse.
Accountants are as interested in words and form as they are about numbers.
Pay attention to Nothing.
Did you get this far in the post? My mentioning that dreaded word–accounting–didn’t scare you off? (yet?) Great! I feel trusted.
I spent three days in Siena, Italy, among the brightest and sagest of accounting historians. They are a terrifically brilliant and friendly lot, and I was privileged to talk a little myself about my research and medieval accounting (love me some Christine de Pisan). I heard a couple of presentations that I thought even y’all would find interesting, so I promise to skip the bits about Michel Foucault, isomorphism, and The Institutional Method. Herein, I shall pass on a few juicy items that you, my blog public, will appreciate.
History Should Not Be a Game of Telephone
I must talk a bit about Luca Pacioli to explain the first thing. I’ve written about Pacioli before, “P is for Pacioli” (April A-Z, 2021). Pacioli is known as the “father of accounting” because he is believed to have written the very first printed textbook on double-entry bookkeeping. DEB, as it’s known in the biz, is how everyone in the world keeps their books today.
You probably noticed the “believes to have” stuff. Whether his was the first, whether Pacioli wrote it, and whether this book invented DEB is hotly debated, 500 years later. Two influential economists in the 19th century even argued that Pacioli invented (or prompted the creation of) capitalism, which is why his stuff has gotten so much notice by people who are not accounting historians.
I wrote part of my master’s thesis about Pacioli– not that “did he or didn’t he” business–but about why he put so much religious commentary among the debit and credit entries. Hence, I was soaking up all the references to Pacioli in the conference, which were frequent. I was particularly fan-girling because The Foremost Expert on Pacioli, Professor Alan Sangster from the University of Edinburgh, was at the conference, and he did a paper on Pacioli (and he spoke to me and shook my hand!!!!!)
According to Sangster, the prevailing views about what is understood about Pacioli and 13th-15th century double-entry accounting is completely wrong and is getting worse. Now, I bet you will find the reason for this interest, even if I don’t get into the weeds about everything, list the names of all the scholars, and the technical distinction between double-entry bookkeeping and double-entry accounting, core to Sangster’s argument. The issue is that a couple of professors in the 19th and 20th century wrote their description of Pacioli’s work and analyzed medieval accounting from their point of view. Then, everybody afterward just read those guys.
Historians are supposed to go back to primary sources, repeatedly, in their original language, in the archive. Each generation learns more, so when you go back, you can find new stuff. That’s why so many people can still write about the US Civil War–they find more stuff. But, for various reasons, Sangster said, accounting historians didn’t do that–they just went and read the Guys (secondary sources) and argued with those Guys, not looking at Pacioli.
Some even looked only at a key 20th century English translation of the original text which, Sangster also noted, had errors. It’s not that the 19th and 20th century guys were entirely wrong, either, but that interpretations of what They said were sloppy, too. So historians started playing this giant game of telephone–geez, I just realized, I may have to explain this a little. Telephone is a game where you whisper a message in someone’s ear, then they whisper it in the next, and so on, until after about five people, the message is completely garbled. Actually, with modern cell phones that game still makes sense.
Going Back to the Source
I’m not an expert in DEB or medieval accounting, although I’m more expert than the average passerby, certainly. I also don’t read Italian, let alone medieval Tuscan Italian that’s been squeezed into tiny spaces because paper is so valuable. But I can tell you two things. First, you can’t just read what someone else read about what someone else read. You know that from social media.
Secondly, it so happens that the accounting chapter in Pacioli’s math textbook is some 30 pages out of 600. That alone should tell us that Pacioli definitely didn’t set out to become the father of accounting or invent capitalism. He was writing a math encyclopedia; he was not inventing a new way to do bookkeeping.
Moral of that story: If there’s only one or two guys (and straight, white, male Euro-centric intellectuals at that) who analyzed an old text, it’s a good idea to get an updated opinion. If you have to find someone today who reads medieval Tuscan Italian, that might be what you need to do.
But the most exciting part of this story is that I was lucky enough to see the original. Pacioli’s encyclopedia, Summa Arithmetica, was printed on the newfangled technology of 1494, the Gutenberg Press. There are still a few copies floated around the world, and one is in the tiny library of Pacioli’s home town, Sansepolcro. Which just so happens to be a ninety-minute drive from Siena. So, I talked my wife into navigating the Italian roads in our too-big rental car from Siena to Sansepolcro. Via several advanced email exchanges, I had arranged to meet with Dr. Allesio Duranti to see The Book. He didn’t speak much English, and I speak virtually no Italian. But I gestured, and he obliged, letting me take about a thousand pictures of it while I tried not to levitate. If you can’t quite get excited about it, pretend I’m talking about seeing the handwritten notes from John Lennon about the song “Imagine,” or Michael Jordan’s first basketball shoes, or whatever would make you go SQUEEEEE like I did.
Accountants Used Pictures, Too
Another important historical fact about accountants is that they invented everything. Well, not everything, just writing and numbers. The tax collectors of Uruk, in ancient Mesopotamia, drew pictures of sheep and crops and wrapped them in these little clay balls. Centuries later, those pictures became letters, and the tick marks for how many became numbers. I covered this before, too, “C is for Clay Balls” (April 2021).
So when the word “Mesopotamia” popped up in another presentation, by Professor Keith Hoskins, my ears pricked up. Hoskins said a lot of big words that went over my head, but when he said accounting wasn’t just about writing and numbers, I got it. Accounting was about pictures, too, not just counting.
The five of you who are accountants know what I mean. Looking at financial statements means looking closely at a format. Things are supposed to be in the right place and having them in the right place helps tell when things are not in the right place. Accounting isn’t just looking at a giant, unparsed data set (I’m throwing a bone to the techno-nerds, too) it’s looking to make sure things are balanced. It’s about seeing.
I mean, think about it. What’s a financial statement? It’s a picture of numbers in a format. And it’s called what now? Words, pictures, and numbers have always been braided together.
Look for Zero
The final fascinating presentation I want to mention was the keynote speech by Professor Paolo Quattrone, a medievalist equally at home in Italy and the U.K.. He talked of how the meanings of words have shifted over time. Accounting was originally about proportioning, about ratio-nality. Creating a view of how pieces flow together. Profit was a calculation of one piece of information, not the goal; a piece of the pie, not the pie.
Accountants ratio-nalize by putting things into their proper structures. Stories often present accountants as a trope, the narrow-minded, the detail-oriented person who can’t handle any spontaneity or ambiguity. Accountants know that we’re the opposite. We’re the ones given very little information and asked to create the statement, the presentation, the argument. People walk into the tax site I support with baskets full of papers and expect us to sort it out. We organize the mess.
Creative Accounting isn’t a contradiction in terms; it’s a tautology.
Quattrone also noted that absences are important. For example, we drink Coke with Zero Sugar. The important thing is what the soda does NOT have. Maybe we should know the chemicals it does have, though that’s another story.
Think about that meeting where the Key Guy was not there. Wasn’t the ultimate decision a differnet one? History is often about Absences, and about asking why can’t we find out about the thing that is missing. Why are there no women in the story? Who put the men in charge to write the only copy ever written? Why, said Sherlock Holmes, did the dog not bark?
Pay attention to no-thing as much as you pay attention to the thing.
And if you have a chance to go to Tuscany, see if you can swing by Sansepolcro to see a rare manuscript, and imagine yourself writing a little handbook for your merchant friends. Who knows what someone might do with those sample entries in 500 years?
