MIGNE.APP

Cruces

Commentatio in Cantica canticorum ex Bernardo contexta

William of Saint-Thierry — read the work →

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 →

Uncertain / garbled printed readings rendered literally in the English, logged here per the marker discipline. None are true corruptions blocking sense; these are printer-level anomalies and elliptical phrasings.

## col 0418D (chunk 0004, §13)

## col 0419C (chunk 0004, §14)

## col 0421A (chunk 0005, §16)

No textual cruces encountered. The printed Latin (Migne PL 184, cols 0422C–0436A) was clean throughout; no garbled, corrupt, or ambiguous readings required literal-over-emended rendering.

Translation notes (not cruces, logged for the record)

<!-- 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.

0418C — dropped-non (migne, medium confidence)

Printed: Effusio quippe notat abundantiam. Haec est effusio in fide vel spe, sed in charitatis tantum plenitudine.

Conjecture: Non est effusio in fide vel spe, sed in charitatis tantum plenitudine (or Nec est effusio…) — 'there is no pouring out in faith or in hope, but only in the fullness of charity'

The sentence's own second half, 'sed in charitatis TANTUM plenitudine' ('but ONLY in the fullness of charity'), is an exclusive correction and requires a negated first limb; as printed the clause first locates the effusio in faith and hope and then denies it of anything but charity. The surrounding argument says the same: the effusio is what charity alone supplies — 'ex abundantia olei accepti a Deo' and, a few lines later, 'Quae enim per fidem primum adolescentula est, vel pedisequa, incipit sponsa esse cum incipit diligere' (faith gives only the maiden; love makes the bride). Our English reproduces the defective Latin verbatim, so the printed and the rendered sentence are equally incoherent.

0435A — dropped-word (migne, low confidence)

Printed: Cumque charitate ordinata sibi et Deo vacaret, filiosque negligeret, actumque Dei actui eorum praeponeret; facta est fames verbi Dei: parvuli petierunt panem, nec erat qui porrigeret eis.

Conjecture: Cumque charitate INORDINATA sibi et Deo vacaret…

The state described is the bride's fault, not her good order: the same paragraph says 'Mater vero quia NON VOLEBAT labore bonorum studiorum et actuum agere, putans se acturam sola oratione', it produces a famine of the word and the devil's return, God rebukes her ('Non enim, ut dicis, parum habes olei, quae in tempore famis non solum pascendam te, sed ungendam praesumis'), and the cure is 'Audiens haec sponsa, charitatem REORDINAVIT' — which presupposes charity had become disordered. Chunk 0010 supplies the rule broken here: 'Necessitas charitatis saepe omnia his contraria… Necessitas non habet legem.' A defensible reading survives (she kept the LEX of charity while failing its NECESSITAS), hence low confidence.