On old age: Rare 1535 book found at King's Inns by DCU researcher

The rare Cicero book from 1535

A rare edition of a text by Cicero on old age, published in London almost five hundred years ago, has been discovered at King's Inns Library, Dublin. No other copy is known to exist in Ireland. It was produced sixteen years before the first book of any kind was printed in Ireland.

Just ten copies of this edition of Cicero are known to survive internationally, eight in Britain and two in the USA.

Professor Colum Kenny of Dublin City University found the edition while engaged in research for a lecture to be delivered today, Tuesday, 4th November, at 5pm in the King's Inns Library: "On lawyers, their obligations and the Cicero collection at King's Inns Library".

The short work which has been discovered is a dual-language version of Cicero's famous tract 'On Old Age - De Senectute', in Latin and English. It was printed in London in 1535 by John Bydell, who learnt his trade from Wynkyn de Worde, a pupil of William Caxton. Caxton was the first man to operate a printing press in England.

This newly discovered copy includes an English translation by Robert Whittington (1480-1553), then teacher of the noble youths of the royal household of King Henry VIII.

The work was found bound into the back of a larger volume, acquired by King's Inns Library sometime in the nineteenth century. It had never been identified on the spine of its joint binding or in the library catalogue. The oldest volume in King's Inns Library is also an edition of Cicero, On duty, which is believed to have been printed in France about 1485.

Kenny's lecture is the nineteenth in a series of lectures in legal bibliography organised by Hugh M. Fitzpatrick, library and information consultant.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 - 43 BC) was a Roman lawyer, politician and philosopher who met a brutal end. In forced retirement from the courts and senate, he was hunted down by enemies who chopped off his head and hands before placing them on public display. Moral aspects of Cicero's works later inspired intellectual 'fathers' of the Christian church such as St Ambrose and St Augustine, while the complexity and quality of his writings delighted humanists such as Petrarch and Erasmus. Recently, blockbuster author Robert Harris based his novel IMPERIUM (Hutchinson, 2006) on Cicero's life.

Cicero was very widely read in Europe into the nineteenth century, and survived on school curricula even more recently. The dates of publication of some fifty Cicero titles in King's Inns Library span more than five hundred years from shortly after the birth of printing in Europe, and reflect his abiding influence.

Click here for RTÉ News video.