Accounting and the Restoration of Pastoral Power in the 15th-Century Roman Catholic Church

Informed by the work of Foucault on pastoral power, this chapter examines the genealogical core of governmentality in the context of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of great crisis in the 15th century. The contributions of accounting to pastoral power were pivotal in restoring the Church’s standing and influence. Accounting was one of the technologies that allowed the bishops to control both the diocese as a whole and each priest, to subjugate the priests to the bishops’ authority and, thereby, to govern the diocese through a never-ending extraction of truth.