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 →
Garbled or corrupt printed readings, rendered literally in the English and logged here.
Chunk 0
- 1587D–1588A — Printed: quem vul [1588A] indurat. vul is not a word: broken type for vult ("wills"), the t lost at the column break, and the parallel Cui vult miseretur three words earlier prints vult correctly. Per Pattern 7 the non-word is carried through untranslated — "and whom vul he hardens." (The whole Rom. IX, 18 lemma is already set in italic in Migne, so the carried-through form stands in italics with the rest of the run rather than taking an italic marker of its own.)
- 1588C — Printed: ei ideo Deus juste ibi cum deserit. Both anomalies are real Latin words, so both are rendered as printed: ei ("to him") where the sense wants et ("and"), and cum ("when") where it wants eum ("him", the object of deserit). The clause as printed has no object for deserit and a stranded conjunction, and is not construable; rendered as closely as the printed words allow — "to him therefore God justly there when forsakes." The intended reading is et ideo Deus juste ibi eum deserit, "and therefore God justly forsakes him there," which is what the surrounding argument about desertion requires.
- 1588C — Deum peccator flagellatur. Deum is a real Latin word (accusative of Deus), so it is translated — "God the sinner is scourged" — and the clause is left as unconstruable in English as it is in the printed Latin: an accusative standing before a nominative subject and a passive verb, governed by nothing. Carry-through in italics is reserved for type that is not a word at all (Pattern 7 boundary), which this is not. The intended reading is Dum ("While the sinner is scourged…"), which the following clauses require.
- 1590A — Printed: diligit se, diligitamicum. diligitamicum is not a word: diligit amicum ("loves the friend") set run together, as the three parallel members diligit Deum / diligit se / diligit inimicum show. Per Pattern 7 the non-word is carried into the English untranslated and in italics — "loves God, loves itself, diligitamicum, loves the enemy" — matching the treatment of canticograduum at 1590A below. An earlier draft split it into two words; that has been withdrawn.
- 1590A — hoc ostenditur in canticograduum: cantico graduum ("in the Song of Degrees / the gradual psalms") printed run together. Left as the printed single word in the English.
- 1590C — Continentia praecedit luxuriam, humilitas superbiam. The surrounding argument is that the virtues cut down (praecidunt) their contraries — the previous sentence uses exactly that verb — so praecedit is likely a misprint for praecidit. Rendered as printed ("goes before"), but the sense wanted is "cuts down."
Chunk 1
- 1591B — impedit menstruis. menstruis is a real Latin word (dative/ablative plural of menstruum), so it is translated — "hinders with the monthly courses" — and the clause stays as unconstruable as the printed Latin: every other member of the list is verb + accusative object, and this one supplies an oblique case with nothing to govern it. The intended reading is the accusative menstrua. No italic carry-through: the boundary in Pattern 7 is that italics mark type that is not a word at all.
- 1591B — turbo captus. captus is a real Latin word — read as the perfect participle of capio it is nominative and agrees with turbo, and it is so rendered, "a whirlwind captured," which is as unconstruable in the English as in the Latin (it can also be taken as the genitive of captus, -ūs, "of grasp," which would construe but is not what the sense wants). The intended reading is turbo capitis ("a whirlwind of the head"), matching the string of genitives around it. Not italicized: it is a word, not broken type.
- 1592A — Exiet Virga de radice Jesse … [n: (Isa. II, 1)]. The verse is Isaiah 11:1; the printed citation Isa. II, 1 is wrong. Citation passes through verbatim per the marker rule. Note also that the argument about the rod bearing nuts imports Numbers 17 (Aaron's rod) into the Isaiah lemma — that is the author's move, not a corruption.
- 1592B — In testa lignum inserens crucis qui non discrevit, id quod foris et intus, sed quae terrena…. Badly tangled: qui has no antecedent (expect quod or quae), and id quod is left dangling. Rendered as literally as the syntax allows.
- 1592B — The Colossians quotation is printed without an
[n: …]wrapper and with an unclosed parenthesis and a stray asterisk:(Colos. I, 20*.Reproduced exactly as printed; this is a typesetting failure, not an authorial variant, and does not count towardnoteCount(2). - 1592B — Jugum enim meum suave est… [n: (Matth. XI, 20)]. The verse is Matthew 11:30; the printed citation is wrong. Passes through verbatim.
- 1592C — Printed: colabilis sit. sit is a real word (present subjunctive of sum), so it is rendered as printed: "may be able to be strained down." The intended reading is almost certainly the indicative fit ("becomes"), which the three parallel similes in the same sentence-chain use (avolat, trahit); a subjunctive has nothing to depend on here.
<!-- 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.
1590C — sense-reversing-letter (migne, high confidence)
Printed: Virtutes vocantur arma lucis; arma, quia praecidunt contraria; lucis, quia pulsis tenebris faciunt lumen menti. Continentia praecedit luxuriam, humilitas superbiam, sic et in caeteris.
Conjecture: Continentia praecidit luxuriam (praecidit, not praecedit) — 'continence cuts off lust', matching praecidunt in the sentence before
The contradicting neighbour is the clause immediately preceding, which defines the whole figure: 'arma, quia praecidunt contraria' — the virtues are ARMS precisely because they CUT DOWN their contraries. The examples that follow are supposed to instance that cutting down; 'praecedit' instead makes continence merely go BEFORE lust in sequence, which would make the virtues antecedents of the vices rather than their destroyers, and leaves 'arma' and 'praecidunt' with nothing to illustrate them. The same paragraph continues in the same key ('Clavis virtutum pelluntur clavi vitiorum' — the nails of the virtues DRIVE OUT the nails of the vices), confirming that expulsion, not precedence, is the sense required.