Accounting in the organisation and life of a religious institution: the Monastery of Santa Ana in the eighteenth century

Abstract

Set in the municipal archives of Braga, this article studies the accounting system and practices of the Monastery of Santa Ana, a female monastery located in a small town, Viana do Castelo, in the north of Portugal, during the eighteenth century. This work is a full-scale examination of the interlink between governance and accounting aspects of Benedictine organisations. It sheds light on the extent of management and administration that the female gender was able to exercise pertaining to a monastic order. The use of ‘displacement’ and ‘restraint’ concepts is pivotal to such exploration in the Monastery. The analysis of the accounting practices makes visible that large parts of its governance was embedded in social and internal accounting controls rather than the principal-agent type of relationship between the abbess, her auxiliaries and the monastery. Moreover, accounting practices help to appreciate the level of freedom of nuns that exceeded the actual freedom of a contemporary married woman.