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/irregular printed readings in Migne PL 196, logged during translation.
Chunk 0001
- Col 1190A — reading:
Nam de districtiss ma pro eadem blasphemia aliquid remittitur. Migne printsdistrictiss mawith a space fracturing the word; the intended word is districtissima (fem., agreeing with an understood expiatione — cf. the phrase de plenitudine districtissimae expiationis a few lines below at 1190B, and districtissimae damnationis following). Rendered per sense as "the most strict expiation"; the fracture is a typographic break, not a genuine variant.
Note anomaly (not garbled type, recorded for reference)
- Col 1190C — the
[n: (I Cor. XXIII)]marker cites 1 Corinthians ch. XXIII for Charitas nunquam excidit (in fact 1 Cor. 13:8). Migne's printed chapter number is erroneous, but[n: ...]markers pass through verbatim per the marker rule, so it is reproduced unchanged in the English chunk and merely noted here.
PL 196 polarity sweep (2026-07-28) — NOT a defect
The sweep flagged 1188D as a dropped non, and it is worth recording that it is not one.
Migne prints Quid enim est dicere esse genus peccati de quo homo [non] possit veniam consequi? — with the negative present, in Migne's own square brackets. That is the plate's own editorial supplement (his standard practice; there are roughly 95 such brackets across the corpus), and our English carries it through faithfully as [not]. Nothing is missing and nothing needs repair.
It is logged here for two reasons. First, so the next sweep does not re-raise it. Second, because it is evidence about the volume: the 19th-century editors were themselves patching dropped negatives in PL 196, which is independent support for the pattern the sweep found — 29 sense-reversing sites across 12 works of this one volume.
It also illustrates the unresolved bracket-overload problem: a reader meets [not] on the page with no way to tell Migne's supplement from a word we supplied.