The St. Catherine’s Hospital in Regensburg. Resilience and Charity as Reflected in Accounting from the 14th to the 21st Century (Das Regensburger St. Katharinenspital. Resilienz und Caritas im Spiegel der Rechnungslegung vom 14. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert)
Author : Wolfgang Wüst
Abstract :
Accounting archives are portals for diversified questions and interdisciplinary research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, economics and natural sciences, but especially in the systematic use of the digital humanities. However, they are also the focus of regional history in general and hospital history in particular. The good state of preservation of the accounts archive in St. Catharine's Hospital ultimately also testifies to the fact that the Regensburg hospital administration has taken the greatest care in the financial and economic area over the centuries since 1354. However, the continuity of accounting, which we consult for the topics of resilience and charity, has been in a state of upheaval since the end of the 20th century at the latest, at least as far as the storage medium is concerned. Electronic invoice processing is becoming increasingly important in Europe's hospitals and companies, in state administrations and organizations. This opens up new possibilities for future research, but also poses risks for the long-term preservation of data. In 2012, a conference was held at the Institute of Information Systems in Braunschweig with a contribution entitled: “Quo vadis electronic invoicing? - State of research, gaps, questions and potential”. Once again, the role of digitalization as a key factor for economic growth was highlighted, which requires electronic invoice processing programs in particular. Once implemented, this means the loss of important syntactic relationships in the maze of numbers for income and expenditure when securing hospital-related annual balance sheets. A complex entry under the income (unpaid interest) from the 1623/24 account book, which also contains statements about the indebtedness of a Regensburg taxpayer with details of his profession, about the applicable interest rate of a loan, about the waiver of immediate collection of money and taxes by the hospital with possible resilient or charitable motivation, would lose its substance in a merely sum-oriented electronic data entry. Syntax is the meat of the number skeleton, which is crucial for cultural science issues. It is therefore to be feared that in the future, questions about resilience and charity will be difficult to research in the skeleton of serial electronic data sets.
Keywords :
Regensburg, St. Catherine’s hospital, resilience, charity, accounting archives, taxes, digital humanities, electronic data, Middle Ages, Early modern times, Contemporary history.
