Renaissance

In Double Entry, the Renaissance is the central historical payoff of Jane Gleeson-White’s argument that a measurement technology helped produce a cultural epoch. The book’s thesis is that double-entry bookkeeping — perfected by the merchants of Venice as bookkeeping alla viniziana and codified for print in Luca Pacioli’s 1494 treatise Particularis de computis et scripturis — “arguably made possible the wealth and cultural efflorescence that was the Renaissance,” and then enabled capitalism to flourish. The northern Italian city-states (Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Venice), swept up in a commercial explosion seeded by the Crusades, developed this new record-keeping to cope with growing business complexity, and the resulting wealth underwrote the Renaissance’s artistic flowering.

Gleeson-White also recovers a side of the Renaissance “rarely remembered today, when we celebrate almost exclusively its artistic flowering”: a radically new attitude toward money. Leon Battista Alberti, writing in the 1430s, called money “the root of all things” — a respect for material wealth, thrift, and the value of time that the historian Fernand Braudel saw as the “good bourgeois principles” entering European consciousness. In the wiki, Kyle links this to Progress Studies (accounting as a measurement technology that helped produce the Renaissance and capitalism) and the Republic of Letters (the print-driven diffusion of Venetian bookkeeping across Europe).

Context: The Renaissance was the period of European cultural, artistic, and intellectual revival spanning roughly the 14th to 17th centuries, originating in the Italian city-states and marked by a renewed engagement with classical antiquity, humanism, and commerce.

Where this appears

• Double Entry — the book’s claim that double-entry bookkeeping helped make possible the wealth and cultural efflorescence of the Renaissance, and Alberti’s new Renaissance attitude toward money