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This paper explores the stereotype of the accountant in Florentine medieval popular culture based on literary works and from a historical perspective. It aims to highlight how stereotypes change with time and represent the cultural and historical evolution of a society. This research challenges Miley and Read (2012), who stated that the foundation of the stereotype was in Commedia dell'arte, an Italian form of improvisational theatre commenced in the 15th century.

The authors applied a qualitative research method to examine the accountant from a medieval popular culture perspective. The analysis consists of two phases: (1) categorisation of the accountant stereotype based on accounting history literature and (2) thematic analysis of The Divine Comedy (1307–1313) and The Decameron (1348–1351). The authors explored a synchronic perspective of historical investigation through a “cross-author” comparison, identifying Dante Alighieri as the first key author of medieval popular culture. During his imaginary journey through The Divine Comedy, Dante describes the social, political and economic context of the Florentine people of the 14th century. Then, with its various folkloristic elements, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio becomes the “manifesto” of the popular culture in the Florentine medieval times.

This study shows the change of the accountant stereotype from the medieval age to the Renaissance. The Divine Comedy mainly connotes a negative accountant stereotype. The 14th century's Florentine gentlemen (“i galantuomini”) are apparently positive characters, with an ordered and clean aspect, but they are accused of being usurers. Dante Alighieri pictures the accountant as a “servant of capitalism”, “dishonest person, excessively fixated with money”, “villain and evil” and “excessively rational”. Giovanni Boccaccio mainly portrays a positive accountant stereotype. The accountant is increasingly more reliable, and this “commercial man” takes a more prestigious role in the society. In The Decameron, the accountant is depicted as a “hero”, “gentleman”, “family-oriented person with a high level of work commitment” and “colourful persona, warm, and emotional”. Overall, the authors provided new evidence on the existence of the accountant stereotype in the Florentine medieval popular.

This study engages with accounting history literature accountants' stereotypes in an unexplored context and time period, providing a base for comparative international research on accounting stereotypes and popular culture. Additionally, it addresses the need for further research on the accountant stereotype based on literary works and from a historical perspective. Therefore, this research also expands the New Accounting History (NAH) literature, focussing on the investigation of the accountant stereotype connotations in the 14th century.

The art started to pause in our city due to ‘Corona’. While it is already dying for economic, cultural, and political reasons, it has been thoroughly covered by the COVID-19 outbreak. In our city, which we consider young and modern, Mersin University Faculty of Fine Arts and Toros University Faculty of Fine Arts provide art education and hundreds of students graduate each year. In this epidemic process, there is no movement towards art in the city when the young population returns to their homes or to cities with their families. No wonder people started to rely on machines rather than nature after the epidemic. It almost halved the human lineage on our planet. Scientists, physicians, economists, and explorers have devoted themselves to destroying or weakening natural forces that would hinder the development of humanity for 300 years. The human race fought nature and upper organisms with railways, dams, engines, antibiotics, and atomic bombs. The painters documented the epidemic by producing pictures on the subject of the epidemic. Now we have to face the threats such as the warming of the world and environmental pollution, the epidemic every day. In this entire confrontation process, the lessons conducted online in our city have been tried to be shown as virtual exhibitions under the name of online. The contributions of this process in the context of ‘art’ and ‘the city’ have been examined and the results will be evaluated.

“Questionable” books are as easily identified and as quickly discovered as brightly dyed Easter eggs. The titles of such books invariably terminate with interrogation marks; not with dots, dashes, or asterisks. Nevertheless, even a well read scholar finds himself hard put to recollect half a dozen illustrative titles unless he has previously indulged in considerable bibliographic dowsing. The reason so few examples readily come to mind is that intriguing interrogatory titles are actually few in number.

As part of the Journal's series of profiles of UK organisations working in the field of vulnerable adults and adult abuse the work of the Ann Craft Trust (formerly NAPSAC) is outlined by it's Director and Co‐ordinator. As one of the UK's first campaigning and educational organisations for adult protection, the Trust can justifiably claim some credit for the upturn in awareness and policy development over the last decade.

‘Nothing’, Winston Churchill assured the readers of Nash's Pall Mall Magazine in 1925, ‘makes a man more reverent than a library’, and to prove his point, imagined a day spent browsing amongst a really large collection of books. Such a day could end only in despair at the sight of the ‘vast, infinitely‐varied store of knowledge and wisdom which the human race has accumulated and preserved’; to read, to admire and to enjoy even a few of the treasures of saints, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers is beyond our time on earth. ‘But if you cannot read them’, he continued,

IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.

ON the face of it the Report of the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London might seem to be of no concern to authorities outside the area, but it is certain that all concerned with local government have their eyes firmly glued on the eventual fate of the Report. For what happens in Greater London could well be a pointer for local government reform in the rest of the country. Librarians are among the many people who have an intense interest in this, despite the fact that only one of the Report's 1,011 paragraphs dealt with libraries.