Ancestors of governmentality: Accounting and pastoral power in the 15th century

•In the 15th century to address the moral decay of the Roman Catholic Church it underwent significant reform.•Reform was meant to restore the moral standing of the Church through the implements of pastoral power.•Pastoral power relied upon close control of individual priests.•Accounting was critical to pastoral power by providing a means to monitor the behaviour of priests and to ensure the use of church assets for spiritual purposes. Foucault identified the roots of governmentality in religious beliefs and religious history with its genealogical core the equivalent of pastoral power, the art of governing people by relying on a dualistic logic; individualization and totalization. This technology of power arose and matured within the Roman Catholic Church and provided a model for many states in the achievement and exercise of power. Informed by the work of Foucault on pastoral power the present work examines the genealogical core of governmentality in the context of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of great crisis in the 15th century when the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing reform instituted by Pope Eugenius IV (1431–1447). The contributions of accounting to pastoral power are shown in this study to have been 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.