18th Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age @ the University of Pennsylvania

Erasmus wrote of it as “three little books of pure gold.” Pliny the Elder as among books that one “ought to learn by heart, not just hold in your hand every day.” Petrarch lists it among the titles in his personal library, as do Ambrose, Hernando Colón, and John Adams. More than seven hundred manuscript copies are known, dating from twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. It was the first secular, classical text printed in Europe and appeared in seventy separate editions before 1500. Most often circulated alongside companion treatises Paradoxa Stoicorum, De Senectute, and De Amicitia, both manuscript and print copies are frequently annotated with extensive readers’ marks and marginalia. Focusing on literary and especially bibliographical traces of reading and reception, as well as on the work’s significant Aristotelian debts, this paper explores the outsized and yet still underappreciated impact that Cicero’s De Officiis history had on post-classical readers up to the early modern period, from the 1400s to the 1600s, from Brescia to Boston.