Secular Bookkeepers as Spiritual Fathers: Capuchin Accounting Practices in Catholic Europe and the Missions Overseas (1580–1770)

Abstract Examining the accounting practices of five Capuchin convents from the Swiss province of the order, this essay explores how the order’s renewed ideal of Franciscan poverty impacted Catholic societies’ self-perception. It shows that early modern Catholics used the Capuchin order to reassure themselves of their favour in heaven and, at the same time, to shape their local and translocal relations. To trace the order’s influence in the moral economy of Catholic communities, the essay focuses on the controversial office of the “spiritual father.” These secular bookkeepers managed the financial affairs of the convents, enabling the friars to fulfil their commandments of poverty. Their activities brought them into exclusive proximity to the order, revealing various mechanisms by which actors from outside the order could participate in the order’s esteem. The late abolition of the office and the self-positioning as a missionary territory point to processes of the communalisation of religious practice within the Swiss province of the order. The simultaneous attempt by the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide to introduce the office in the overseas Capuchin missions made them appear as inverted mirror images of the European convents and highlights the everlasting ambiguity of Franciscan poverty.