Rethinking the Sacred and Secular Divide. Accounting and Accountability Practices in the Diocese of Ferrara (1431-1457)

Purpose – Informed by the work of Laughlin and Booth, the paper analyses the role of accounting and accountability practices within the 15th century Roman Catholic Church, more specifically within the Diocese of Ferrara (northern Italy), in order to determine the presence of a sacred-secular dichotomy. Pope Eugenius IV had embarked upon a comprehensive reform of the Church to counter the spreading moral corruption within the clergy and the subsequent disaffection with the Church by many believers. The reforms were notable not only for the Pope’s determination to restore the moral authority and power of the Church but for the essential contributions of ‘profane’ financial and accounting practices to the success of the reforms.
Design/methodology/approach – Original 15th century Latin documents and account books of the Diocese of Ferrara are used to highlight the link between the new sacred values imposed by Pope Eugenius IV’s reforms and accounting and accountability practices.
Findings – The documents reveal that secular accounting and accountability practices were not regarded as necessarily antithetical to religious values, as would be expected by Laughlin and Booth. Instead, they were seen to assume a role which was complementary to the Church’s religious mission. Indeed, they were essential to its sacred mission during a period in which the Pope sought to arrest the moral decay of the clergy and reinstate the Church’s authority. Research implications/limitations – The paper shows that the sacred-secular dichotomy cannot be considered as a priori valid in space and time. There is also scope for examining other Italian dioceses where there was little evidence of Pope Eugenius’ reforms.
Originality/value – The paper presents a critique of the sacred-secular divide paradigm by considering an under-researched period and a non Anglo-Saxon context.

Education and the 'universalist' idiom of empire: Irish National School Books in Ireland and Ontario

This paper compares the founding of the elementary school systems of Ireland and Ontario in the nineteenth century. The systems shared a common set of textbooks that had originated in Ireland. Using examples from a number of these books, which were part of a series that had been specially prepared for the Irish national school system, founded in 1831, and information from archive sources on policy and administration in both countries, the paper argues that there was a common, ‘universalist’, imperialist ideology being promulgated in both systems. The article focuses on these ‘universalist’ principles rather than undertaking a detailed analysis of the textbooks.

'Calling the Judiciary to Account for the Past: Transitional Justice and Judicial Accountability in Nigeria'

Institutional and individual accountability is an important feature of societies in transition from conflict or authoritarian rule. The imperative of accountability has both normative and transformational underpinnings in the context of restoration of the rule of law and democracy. This article argues a case for extending the purview of truth-telling processes to the judiciary in postauthoritarian contexts. The driving force behind the inquiry is the proposition that the judiciary as the third arm of government at all times participates in governance. To contextualize the argument, I focus on judicial governance and accountability within the paradigm of Nigeria’s transition to democracy after decades of authoritarian military rule.

The relationship between counterfactual thinking and emotional reactions to event outcomes: Does one account fit all?

By enabling a comparison between what is and what might have been, counterfactual thoughts amplify our emotional responses to bad outcomes. Well-known demonstrations such as the action effect (the tendency to attribute most regret to a character whose actions brought about a bad outcome) and the temporal order effect (the tendency to undo the last in a series of events leading up to a bad outcome) are often explained in this way. An important difference between these effects is that outcomes are due to decisions in the action effect, whereas in the temporal order effect outcomes are achieved by chance. In Experiment 1, we showed that imposing time pressure leads to a significant reduction in the action but not in the temporal order effect. In Experiment 2, we found that asking participants to evaluate the protagonists (

Semifactual: Byrne's account of even-if

Byrne's approach to the semifactual conditional captures the reasoning data. However, we argue that it does not account for the processes or Principles by which people arrive at representations of even-if conditionals, upon which their reasoning is said to be based. Drawing upon recent work on the suppositional conditional we present such an account.