Il Rinascimento della Ragioneria: i Trattati quattrocenteschi di Benedetto Cotrugli, Marino De Raphaeli e Luca Pacioli

This work aims at retracing the most fruitful period of Italian accounting treatises, dating back to the 15th centuries. In fact, in that time the first and most important accounting works appeared and the double entry method was illustrated. As is well known, double entry bookkeeping was invented by medieval merchants, but the first treatises on this subject appeared only in the second half of the fifteenth century. Moreover, this period coincides with the cultural phenomenon known as the “Renaissance”. Starting from about the mid-fourteenth century and up to the end of the sixteenth century, our peninsula was in fact pervaded by an intense revolution in the various fields of art, science and technology compared to the Middle Ages understood as a “dark” period. This work therefore aims at framing the first accounting treatises within the broader “Renaissance” phenomenon. From this point of view the main scholar is Luca Pacioli, the well-known Tuscan mathematician who was the first to popularize the double entry method with the publication of the “Summa”. The analysis clearly shows how his figure and his work have been the “fulcrum” around which the modern accounting has been developed. For this reason, after some introductory notes, the work focuses on the pre-paciolian period, as the “preparatory” period, and then focuses on the fifteenth-century accounting treatises, and in particular on Luca Pacioli’s one but also on Benedetto Cotrugli’s and Marino de Raphaeli’s.