English to Italian Other History contabilità del Seicento

Arithmetic and book-keeping had been
taught alongside writing and letter structure as long ago as the sixteenth
century by teachers such as Luca Pacioli (1446–1517) and Johann
Neudörffer the Elder (1497–1563). But the new private schools that sprang
up to supply clerks and accountants to the shops, offices, warehouses
and counting-houses of a now flourishing mercantile nation could be
sizeable establishments. One of the most successful private writing and
accounting Academies of the period was that of Thomas Watts at Little
Tower Street in London, employing four masters, one full-time teacher
of French and several part-time teachers. Such schools ran their own
boarding-houses and courses of study extended for several years. High
standards of legibility and accuracy were demanded from clerks. The
chief resource of the man who would raise capital and enter business
was trust. The credible face of the business lay in its books. As William
Leekey wrote in A Discourse on the Use of the Pen (1766), ‘writing should
be performed in the single Operation; for when after Touches are made,
that Letter so assisted is not wrote, but drawn, painted, or patch’d and that
additional Assistance takes away the very Propriety of Writing’. Accounts
should ‘be kept fair and clean to a Scruple’, ‘without Blots, Razures,
or Interlineations’.136 One of the claims to fame that penmen now
advanced was that they made a contribution to the nation’s wealth and
overseas adventures. In George Bickham’s The British Monarchy (1743), a
representation in maps, pictures and prose of the extent of the territory
belonging to the King of Great Britain, we find ‘All those Countries,
Islands, Forts and Settlements which are in the Round-Hand character,
belong to the King’.137 Penmanship was leveraging an empire.
A particularly good example of just such a contribution to the to the nation’s wealth and
overseas adventures. In George Bickham’s The British Monarchy (1743), a
representation in maps, pictures and prose of the extent of the territory
belonging to the King of Great Britain, we find ‘All those Countries,
Islands, Forts and Settlements which are in the Round-Hand character,
belong to the King’.137 Penmanship was LEVERAGING an empire.