Pacioli’s innovation in accounting : business or academic affairs

Abstract

According to the accounting literature there is no evidence for earlier use of “doubleentry”, as documented by Luca Pacioli in his Summa de Arithmetica Geometrica Proportioni et Proportionalita (1494), before the 13th century AD. Littleton’s popular thesis links doubleentry to the increased intensity in modern times (as compared with in antiquity) of two (all inclusive) groups of economic and technical “antecedents”, while Hoskin and Macve (1986) explain the articulation of double-entry in early Renaissance as an aspect of the new way of writing the text (“new textuality”), that was being developed around same time in Europe by scholars who saw in it (and in accounting, albeit with no particular interest in double-entry itself then) the potential of new power-knowledge relationships. In this study we attempt to explore if double entry, the innovative method for the accounting technology, is business or academic affairs.