Studies of accounting and commerce in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale A review article

Abstract

Chaucer's Shipman's Tale is a satire of late medieval mercantile culture, and it is replete with commercial and accounting language. Literary critics have examined some of the relevant commercial elements such as the influence of double entry bookkeeping and the operations of late medieval foreign exchange markets. This paper introduces the tale to accounting historians by reviewing the literature that examines the business and accounting elements. A review of the critical studies helps us avoid misreading the tale and, thus, distorting inferences about the role of the merchant and his practices in medieval society. There are, however, a number of instances where critics may have misread the tale because of inadequate understanding of accounting and accounting history. Also, we find critics' descriptions of accounting and business practices to be less efficient and precise than the sources upon which they relied. We conclude that literary critics would benefit from collaboration with an accounting historian when making inferences about technical issues. Further, accounting historians will benefit as well from collaboration with the appropriate literature specialist when attempting to analyze a piece of literature as history.This is an appropriate analogy, but a later statement (p. 143) suggests that Woods probably has little idea what is going on in the countinghouse.

Accounting historiography: looking back to the future

“…By way of a final example of the possibilities offered through methodological inquiry and reflection, Walker's (2008) paper assessing the state of accounting history scholarship includes a discussion of the literary turn in which accounting historians have begun to pay attention to accounting history as represented in language and literature. Examples can be found in Parker's (1999aParker's ( , 1999b analysis of accounting in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and in Buckmaster and Buckmaster's (1999) analysis of Chaucer's The Shipman's Tale. Other examples include Phiddian's (1996) study of Swift's A Modest Proposal (written in 1,729) and Connor's (2004) analysis of eighteenth-century fiction, pocketbooks and almanacs revealing the accountant identities and roles of women.…”

Innovation, convergence and argument without end in accounting history

“…Mattessich (2000) identified early forms of 'forensic accounting' in a translation of a short story authored by de Alarcón in nineteenth century Spain. The accounting in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and The Shipman's Tale in particular, was discussed by Parker (1999b) and Buckmaster and Buckmaster (1999). Parker establishes that Chaucer was conversant in accounting and shows how The Shipman's Tale "can be read as a series of transactions expressible in terms of debits and credits".…”

Accounting and detective stories: an excursion to the USA in the 1940s

“…Even the idea of studying accounting via fiction, including historical fiction, is not new, and was encouraged by, Anthony Hopwood, among others, as early as 1994. Some authors reached for English classics, such as Chaucer (Ganim, 1996; Buckmaster and Buckmaster, 1999; Parker, 1999) and Joyce (Warnock, 2008). Among even more distant readings is Josephine Maltby's (1997) analysis of Gustav Freytag's novel Soll und Haben ( Debt and Credit ), a bestseller from 1855.…”