Osservanza e partita doppia. La contabilità della Badia fiorentina nel primo Rinascimento

tognetti sergio

2023-01-01

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Abstract

The Abbey of St. Mary of Florence, known as the Badia fiorentina, is one of the oldest and perhaps the most illustrious monasteries in the lily city. Its origins date back to the last decades of the 10th century. Mentioned by Dante in Canto XV of Paradiso for its function as a 'public clock' in the “sober” and “demure” Florence of the early communal age, the Badia was involved in the major architectural and urban transformations the city underwent in the late medieval centuries, not least because of the vast real estate holdings it had in urban and suburban spaces. In the first decades of the fifteenth century, it was one of the privileged places for the spread of monastic observance in Tuscany, thanks to the long governance of Don Gomes Eanes, a Portuguese religious who was spiritually trained in Venetian circles and who promoted the erection and decoration of a sumptuous new monastic cloister. To the spiritual, cultural and patrimonial prominence of the coenoby should be added an only apparently minor peculiarity: the Badia was the earliest among Florentine monasteries and convents to adopt double-entry bookkeeping for administrative and managerial needs. The availability of ample accounting documentation produced right around the time of Don Gomes' reforms makes it possible to establish a link between the principles of rigor and order expressed by the Observance and the transposition in religious circles of administrative methods that originated in the world of business, which was particularly lively in a city with a strong commercial and manufacturing vocation as Florence was at the time. This volume thus stands at the intersection of two cultures: the corporate and the monastic. The solutions adopted by the Badia and to follow by other pious Florentine places provide unusual perspectives for assessing the role and weight of technical knowledge in ancient-regime societies.