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 →
Typographical corruption
- Argument (p. 379) — printed sigilli confessionnis infractor; confessionnis is a doubled-n misprint for confessionis. Rendered normally.
- col 0630B — printed quid est quod sino determinatione cujusquam ordinis — sino for sine. Rendered "without the determining of any order."
- col 0627C — printed de crimine rogat teneri in confessione.. with a doubled full stop. Reproduced as printed.
Passages rendered on a best reading — worth a human eye
- col 0627C — et is cui, cum imagine [ al., imaginem] familiaritatis, quasi osculum vel exhibet vel exhibuit, de crimine rogat teneri in confessione. The syntax will not resolve cleanly: is cui is left without a governing verb, and the subject of rogat shifts mid-clause. Rendered on the assumption that the betrayer is the subject throughout and the penitent the is cui — i.e. the confessor gives a Judas-kiss of feigned familiarity and then asks that the man be "held fast" for the crime he disclosed. The Judas typology of the surrounding paragraph supports this, but the sentence is genuinely broken.
- col 0629B (end of chunk 0) — raro quidem, nec secundum rigorem Scripturarum, nec aures audire, quam horribiles sint horrescant. No finite main clause; audire is a bare infinitive and horrescant a stranded subjunctive. Rendered "rarely indeed, and not according to the rigor of the Scriptures, do the ears endure to hear how horrible these things are: let them shudder at them." This is a reconstruction, not a translation of sound Latin.
- col 0631C — Ego publice corripere, at tu quaeris inscribere. corripere is an infinitive where a finite verb is wanted (expected corripio or corripere volo). Rendered "I would rebuke him publicly." inscribere is used in its legal sense, "to enter a formal accusation," hence "to indict."
- col 0632B — Si, corrigere voluerint, omnimodis confessa detegimus, teste Spiritu sancto, Antichristi et proditores habemur. The protasis has a plural subject (voluerint) with no antecedent, against a first-plural apodosis (detegimus … habemur); Migne's comma placement makes it worse. Rendered "If they are willing to be corrected, and we nevertheless by every means uncover what has been confessed, then … we are accounted antichrists and betrayers." The sense of the chapter requires the uncovering to be the offense.
Quotation marks and citation form (as printed)
- cols 0631B — Augustine's second and third extracts are introduced by Item idem but the preceding quotation closes with an opening guillemet (…sed proditor. «) rather than ». Mismatched in Migne; reproduced exactly.
- col 0630C — the Cassian quotation opens with « and never closes; the Maximus and Leo quotations that follow are nested inside it with their own paired guillemets. Reproduced as printed.
- col 0630C — Chrysostom's quotation closes (») before the scripture lemma Revela Domino viam tuam that the sentence introduces, so the lemma and the words following fall outside the quotation. Reproduced as printed, though the closing mark almost certainly belongs after consequi.
- cols 0628D and 0632B — two citations are printed as bare italic parentheticals rather than
[n:]markers: (Prov. [0628D] XI, 13) — which has a column anchor falling inside the parenthesis — and (in cap. 18, [0632B] in medio, ad illa verba: Si peccaverit in te, etc.). Both reproduced verbatim, anchors in place, contents untranslated. This is why noteCount is 15 and 16 rather than 16 and 17.
Vocabulary decisions (recorded for consistency)
- ex opere operato / ex opere operantis kept as italic Latin — technical scholastic terms with no clean English equivalent.
- col 0628D — qui Samaritanus est, id est custos preserves an etymological play (Samaritan ← Hebrew shamar, "to keep"). Rendered "a Samaritan — that is, a keeper" so the gloss remains intelligible; the pun does not survive into English and may deserve a reader-facing note.
- sacramenta confessionis rendered "the sacraments of confession" throughout, but at col 0627A Tria esse sacramenta confessionis the word plainly means "sacred things / holy realities" rather than sacraments in the later technical sense (the three being a figure, a union of consciences, and a joint judgment). Rendered "three sacred things in confession" there alone.
<!-- 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). 1 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.
0631C — dropped-word (ours, medium confidence)
Printed: Novit enim nescio quem [0631C] homicidam episcopus, et alius nemo illum novit. Ego publice corripere, at tu quaeris inscribere: prorsus nec prodo, nec negligo. Corripio in secreto, pono ante oculos Dei judicium, terreo cruentam conscientiam, persuadeo poenitentiam.
Conjecture: The printed Latin has no finite verb of willing: 'Ego publice corripere' is an elliptical indignant question or refusal ('I, rebuke publicly? — no, it is you who seek to register a charge'), i.e. the speaker denies that he rebukes publicly. Our English supplied 'I would' and turned the refusal into an assertion, reversing it. Render e.g. 'Am I to rebuke him publicly? — it is you who seek to indict him.' (Alternative, if the defect is Migne's: a dropped 'nolo'/'non possum' after 'publice'.)
The very next clause denies it — 'prorsus nec prodo, nec negligo. Corripio in secreto' ('I neither betray him at all, nor neglect him. I rebuke IN SECRET') — and the immediately preceding sentence of the same Augustine excerpt states the rule the speaker is illustrating: 'In secreto debemus corripere, in secreto arguere, ne, volentes publice arguere, prodamus hominem' ('In secret we ought to rebuke... lest, wishing to reprove publicly, we betray the man'). Rebuking a murderer publicly is precisely the betrayal the passage forbids, so 'I would rebuke him publicly' asserts the opposite of what its own neighbours require.