These are the edition's working notes, published as they were written. They record, work by work, where Migne's plate is defective or the reading uncertain: the printed form, what the English does with it, and why. They are not a groomed apparatus. Where a note argues with itself, withdraws an earlier decision, or leaves a question open, that is the record of how the reading was actually reached, and it is left standing — a conjecture that is visible can be checked, and one that has been tidied away cannot.
The English never silently repairs the page. A construable but wrong reading is rendered literally and the conjecture is recorded here, never applied to the text. How the English is produced and checked →
<!-- corpus-polarity-sweep 2026-07-28 --> ## Corpus polarity sweep — 2026-07-28
Blind Opus read of the Latin/English pair for sense-reversing defects (one word or one letter asserting the opposite of what the context requires). 2 site(s). Migne's defects are recorded here and rendered literally in the English; our own errors were fixed in place. Full context: data/sweeps/corpus-polarity/REPORT.md.
1362B — sense-reversing-letter (migne, medium confidence)
Printed: Vix igitur nunc mitto, quem a nomine videri vellem, si omnibus abscondere possem.
Conjecture: a nemine videri vellem ("which I would wish to be seen by no one"); Migne's nomine for nemine turns the wish inside out
The apodosis in the same sentence is si omnibus abscondere possem — 'if I could hide it from all' — which only follows from a wish to be seen by NO ONE. As printed, 'quem a nomine videri vellem' makes him wish the book seen (from/by the name), the opposite of the condition he attaches to it, and of the whole self-deprecating paragraph that follows (Quem enim rudis et impolitus artifex fecerit annulum, ab aliis videri formidat, 'is afraid to have it seen by others'). Our English silently repairs by inverting the verb to 'would wish to hide' and glossing nomine as 'authorship', so the printed defect leaves no trace in the translation.
1364B — dropped-word (migne, medium confidence)
Printed: In Cantica canticorum, nec filius David, nec rex Israel, sive Hierusalem praescribitur, quia ad incipientes et paterna dignitas et regni proprium nomen sufficit: et aequalis magister est, et nescit se esse regem.
Conjecture: A clause has fallen out by homoeoteleuton after sufficit, e.g. ubi vero ad perfectum venitur (Jerome's contrast). The stated reason belongs to the books where the titles ARE prefixed, not to the one where they are not.
The two immediately preceding sentences give exactly the opposite distribution: Titulus enim in Proverbiis adnotatur: Proverbia Salomonis, filii David, regis Israel. In Ecclesiaste vero: Verba Ecclesiastis, filii David, regis Hierusalem. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are the beginners' books (In Proverbiis parvulam docens), and they DO carry the titles. So 'the titles are not prefixed in Canticles BECAUSE for beginners they suffice' asserts the reverse of what the passage has just established; the sequel et aequalis magister est, et nescit se esse regem is left with no subject-clause of its own. Our English reproduces the defect faithfully and only smooths it with an inserted 'and here'.