Migne Reading Room
About
The Migne Reading Room puts the Fathers of the Church, as Jacques-Paul Migne printed them in the Patrologia Latina (1844–1855) and Patrologia Graeca (1857–1866), beside a new English translation, paragraph by paragraph.
What you are reading. The Latin or Greek is set by hand from our scans of Migne's pages, word by word, as printed, misprints included. The English is translated fresh from that text, never from an earlier translation or a Bible version. Every column keeps Migne's column number, so any passage can be cited the way scholars cite Migne, for example PL 54:212, and linked directly.
What else is on the page. Migne reprinted older editions, with their editors' footnotes, prefaces and notices. These are kept too, set and translated, under "Editors' notes" at the foot of each column, with the page's running head and marginal letters.
How it is made. The translations are produced with Claude (Anthropic) working from the page images under a written contract of rules, and the method is measured against independently verified samples: in our pilot, about one error in two thousand words of Latin. The anthology readings were each verified a second time against the page. Report an error and it will be corrected.
The two collections.
- The Newer Testament: the readings of the Church's Office of Readings, taken out of the calendar and bound into Books by what they say.
- The Library: complete works, volume by volume, growing as each is finished.
Licence. The translations are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0): you may copy, share and adapt them for any purpose, with credit to the Migne Reading Room. Migne's Latin and Greek texts are in the public domain.
Printings. Many of Migne's volumes were reset and reprinted by Garnier after a fire destroyed his stereotype plates in 1868; ours are sometimes the Garnier printing, which has its own misprints. Each volume page says which printing we used.