Italian City-states - Literacy and Numeracy

Literacy and Numeracy

By the 13th century, northern and central Italy had become the most literate society in the world. More than one third of male population could read in the vernacular (an unprecedented rate since the decline of the Western Roman Empire), as could a small but significant proportion of women.

The Italian city states were also highly numerate, given the importance of the new forms of bookkeeping that were essential to the trading and mercantile basis of society. Some of the most widely circulating books, such as the Liber Abaci by Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, included applications of mathematics and arithmetic to business practice or were business manuals based on sophisticated numeracy and literacy.

Indeed Luca Pacioli helped create the Banking system of the Italian city-states with his "double-entry bookkeeping": his 27-page treatise on bookkeeping contained the first known published work on that topic, and is said to have laid the foundation for double-entry bookkeeping (of Genoese merchants) as it is practiced today.