Accountability in Late Medieval Europe

This volume brings together studies of late medieval accountability in both the domestic and the public realms. It traces practices of accountability across the social spectrum, from households to small businesses to communal and regnal administrations, highlighting the intersections between competing conceptions of personal and institutional responsibility. Focusing on France and Italy from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, the case studies follow territorial officers, consular agents, and town notables co-opted into local governance from Avignon and Marseille to Tuscany and the Venetian and Genoese overseas territories. The studies explore both personal and institutional accounting registers, as well as records of a textual nature, such as rulebooks and inquests, in an effort to reflect the range of records and procedures relied on to achieve a measure of accountability in late medieval Europe.