LAUSR

The sub-discipline of accounting education is often traced back to the advent of accounting as a modern profession during the mid-nineteenth century, with education being a key part of the accountancy professionalisation project (Willmott, 1986). Yet, before the words ‘accounting’ and ‘accountancy’ became widely used, earlier forms of accounting, sometimes called ‘reckoning’ and often associated with merchants’ accounts, were used and book-keeping education can be regarded as a forerunner to accounting education (Parker, 1994). It is not unreasonable to assume that whenever these early forms of accounting took place, those participating in accounting required instruction. Despite this, our understanding of how accounting education evolved is largely confined to the recent past and, even then, is far from comprehensive. The paucity of archival evidence from earlier periods perhaps explains the limited discussion of accounting education before the nineteenth century, but some new insights have recently been offered into the development of accounting education alongside the development of double entry bookkeeping in fifteenth-century Italy. Edwards (2011) examines accounting education in Britain in the early modern period (1550–1800) at the time of rapid commercial expansion and early industrialisation. He notes, ‘Education is not yet the subject of significant study by accounting historians’ (Edwards, 2011: 37). Significantly, his vocabulary shows that he does not confine his discussion to a narrow view of accounting education but discusses the teachers and their institutions as well as what was taught, and notes too that often those who practised accounting were self-taught. Likewise, this Special Issue adopts a wide definition of accounting education. As Sangster (2015) shows, historians of the origins of modern accounting have generally accepted that the earliest known instructional treatise on double-entry bookkeeping was published by Luca Pacioli in 1494. Sangster et al. (2008) interpret this work as a manual for small businessmen to learn how to keep accounts. Sangster (2015) presents detailed evidence of an earlier bookkeeping manual from 1475 by Marino de Raphaeli which he describes as the earliest known instructional treatise on double-entry bookkeeping, a work that provides fascinating insights into how bookkeeping was taught in fifteenth-century Venice. As Sangster (2015: 31) states,