Automated Transcription of Medieval Italian Account Books

Reading, understanding, and evaluating account books from late medieval Italy can be a daunting task, even for researchers who have spent years in local archives or other manuscript-holding institutions. While entries vividly depict the everyday realities of medieval Italian life, entries frequently include specialized vocabularies and expressions of exchange, whether industry-specific or based on local linguistic norms. Likewise, accounts feature idiosyncratic vocabularies, personal names, nicknames, or highly localized toponyms, since the goal was to memorialize a specific transaction that took place between two discrete parties. Similarly, specialized abbreviations are common and stand in for the denominations of local currencies (eg., lire, soldi, denari, scudi, etc.), units of measure for certain commodities (eg, braccia of cloth, staia of grain, botte of wine, etc.), or other oft-repeated terms. Additionally, since accounting documents were often created solely for a record-keeper’s or company’s internal use, handwriting was usually informal, as there was no expectation that anyone beyond those who had made the records or their close associates would read them. Financial records are also repetitive, featuring many of the same terms of exchange over and over, meaning that researchers may eventually tire of reading them and question their ultimate value for scholarly use.

At the same time—due in part to what scholars have termed “the documentary revolution”—financial records from the Italian peninsula represent one of the most abundant and detailed types of sources surviving from the later Middle Ages, and thus offer an unparalleled view into the societies in which they were produced. Past scholars, however, have primarily used financial records to study business and accounting history or to launch an investigation into one specialized industry, like the wool or silk trade. The University of Pennsylvania’s Medici-Gondi archive—a large collection of financial records featuring 13th- to 18th-century manuscripts tracking the business dealings of two prominent Florentine families—is one example of a prominent collection that has attracted little scholarly attention since it was acquired by the university some six decades ago. As a fellow at Schoenberg Institution for Manuscript Studies in August 2026, I examined a selection of fifteenth-century account books from the Medici-Gondi collection to test whether HTR technology could help to decipher these complex historical sources. This paper will describe my workflow, examine some of the roadblocks I encountered, and outline the potential for HTR tools to unlock the potential of the fifteenth-century account books, which offer the reader and intimate look into the personal lives of their Florentne creators.