Counting and protecting the resources of the poors. Numbers and words in the ledgers of the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan

Abstract

An efficient and systematic bookkeeping was one of the indispensable elements for the implementation of the Milan hospital reform in the mid-fifteenth century. This reform arrived, in Milan as elsewhere, at the end of several attempts aimed at remedying the bad management of the poors’ resources and directed to a rationalization of the administrations of the city's hospitals and of those of the diocese through the concentration in a new Great Hospital. On the basis of this assumption, the paper from a recapitulation of the factors that urged such reform, it moves toward the description of the account books of the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan. Objects of specific analysis are the formal and content aspects of the hospital’s account books pertaining not only to the medieval practices and the economic knowledge (for example discernible in the accounting methods) and to the results of the operating and capital performance of the hospital (costs, investment, revenue), but also to the concepts revolving around the ledger as a book, artifact to which were attributed cultural, legal and apotropaic values.