Social Accounting in Seventeenth Century Florence. A Foucauldian Analysis of a Plague Town

Informed by Foucault’s work on disciplinary power in 17th century plague towns, this study investigates the use of social accounting during the epidemic that struck Florence in 1630-1631. Social accounting devices, in the form of reports of visits to the streets of Florence, lists of internees in isolation hospitals and those buried in plague pits, effectively ‘froze’ the city space and enabled the tracking of each afflicted individual. The paper documents the role of accounting in the exercise of disciplinary power in its original site, thereby venturing beyond investigations of enclosed institutions such as military academies, factories, hospitals, prisons and schools. It demonstrates how accounting tools supported both inclusionary and exclusionary practices that later became a distinctive feature of modern forms of discipline. The study also offers a more nuanced analysis of the functioning of accounting in disciplinary regimes, which seldom displayed the icy perfection characterised by the ‘panopticon’. The paper suggests that the plague town represents an important site for examining the interconnections between accounting and disciplinary power.