April 12, 2008

Croatia: Land of firsts!

Posted in Bibliography, howto, manuals, training tagged , , , , at 4:16 am by johnthebookie

A man with three names also has three world’s records for manuals, according to CroatianHistory.net. In 1458 Benko Kotruljic (Benedikt Kotruljevic, Benedictus de Cotrullis) wrote the first known manual about book-keeping, Della mercatura e del mercante perfetto, (On merchantry and the perfect merchant). Della mercatura is also the first known manual on double-entry bookkeeping, CroatianHistory.net says.

Wikipedia has a different account, however. The online encyclopedia says the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli first described this method in 1494, in his Summa de arithmetica. The site last month invited anyone interested to “improve this article if you can.”

Writing in Italian, Benko Kotruljic also authored De Navigatione, the first known manual on navigation in the history of Europe, in 1464, according to CroatianHistory.net.

Another Croat working on the other shore of the Adriatic Sea was Pavao Dalmatin, a professor at the University of Bologna. In the early 13th Century, he penned the Summa de confessione. The 1995 book Croatian Humanists, Latinists, and Encyclopaedists called Dalmatin’s work “the first systematic tractate on confession in the history of Catholic theology,”

Again, it looks there might be some dispute on that. Medieval France: An Encyclopedia calls Alain de Lille’s Liber poenitentialis the “first known manual for confessors.”

I don’t wanna start nuthin’ here, now. We’re just havin’ a friendly conversation is all.