The accounts of the Hospital of Saint-Esprit of Marseille, conserved in the 1HD E repository in the Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhone, record the annual incomes and expenditures of the hospital. The extant accounts comprise 143 registers that date from 1306 to the end of the sixteenth century, when Saint-Esprit was amalgamated with the Hospital of Saint-Jacques de Galice to form the Hôtel-Dieu. The accounts, written on paper and bound in registers, are composed in Old Provençal, with a few Latin exceptions. The presence of several imbreviatura (abbreviated scribal notes) accounts suggests that the majority of the registers are in extenso (expanded records with few abbreviations) copies based on imbreviatura that no longer survive. Each register records the incomes and expenditures for Saint-Esprit for a single year, sometimes by week, but, increasingly by the late fourteenth century, by day. Hospital administrators presented the accounts annually, in audit, to the rectors, who were appointed by the municipal council who oversaw Saint-Esprit's administration. The registers are divided by type of transaction and include chapters on rent collection, food purchases, miscellaneous expenditures, wages and labour, bequests, abandoned infants, and care for the sick, amongst others.  The entries provide a rich source for the textual reconstruction of material life in a medieval institution, detailing the textures of daily life through the purchase, sale, and use of the materials and objects that sustained the household. This 1365 account from the Hospital of Saint-Esprit, composed under rectors Bernat de Quonquas and Johan Johan, records the incomes and expenditures for the hospital for one year. The first eleven folios contain an inventory of Saint-Esprit's moveable and immovable property, a feature found in only a few of the medieval accounts of this hospital.

  • Record type: Account Book-Ecclesiastical
  • Date: 1365 to 1366
  • Locale: Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France
  • Language(s): Old Provençal
  • Archival location: Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, Register 1HD E15
  • Extent: 96 Folios (paper, register - quarto)

Edited by Caley McCarthy.
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This folio has not been transcribed.