Special Collections
Book of the Month, November 2007
The Interpreter, or, Booke Containing the Signification of Words
John Cowell
Cambridge: J. Legate, 1607
[D.-L.L.] H6.1 [Cowell]
The famous and controversial discursive legal dictionary The Interpreter was John Cowell’s second book and proved to be his downfall. John Cowell (1554-1611) was a respected civil lawyer, who sat on various commissions and who served as Vice-Chancellor for the University of Cambridge (1603-4) and, from 1598 to 1611, as Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, a stronghold of civil law studies. Cowell wrote The Interpreter in response to appeals from within the legal community for the development of some method for common law practice. Furore arose through his definitions of “subsidie”, “king”, “parlament”, “prerogative” and “recoverie”. Cowell defined the king as being above the law and not subject to it, stated the king’s will as being the highest force and power of the law, and defined the authority of Parliament as incapable of subordinating an absolute monarch to its power. Parliament, when it met in 1610, objected to the perceived derogation to its authority. This led to James I to issue a proclamation suppressing the book, forbidding its “buying, uttering or reading” and commanding those who had already bought copies to relinquish them. Copies were burned publicly, and Cowell was disgraced and retired from public life.
Despite having been banned, the book is not technically rare, with ESTC recording 21 copies in Great Britain, of which six are held by Cambridge University or College libraries and seven at Oxford. There are two copies within the ULRLS (neither as yet noted on ESTC), this one (acquired in 1929) and a copy in the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. This copy is from the Durning-Lawrence Library, which focuses on Sir Francis Bacon. It sits well there, as Bacon was a contemporary of Cowell, and also a lawyer. The Interpreter was reprinted eleven times in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; Senate House Library holds the 1658 edition in the De Morgan library and the 1708 edition within a small collection of books purchased from Chichester Cathedral in 1947.
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