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 →
## Col 1225B (chunk 0000) — obscure/possibly corrupt term
- Reading (as printed):
quas in schola et frequenti verborum commercio consuevistis canigenas appellare - Note:
canigenas(acc. pl.) is not a standard Latin word and yields no clear sense as an epithet for divitiae ("riches") in the schoolroom banter Ernisius recalls; it may be a corruption or a coined slang term. Left untranslated in italic (canigenae) rather than emended or glossed, and rendered: "riches which in the school and in the frequent traffic of words you used to call canigenae."
## Col 1225C (chunk 0000) — printed lacuna in the Horace quotation
- Reading (as printed):
Nunquid tunc fungebamini vice cotis, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . acutum / Reddere quae ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi?[n: (HORAT. Ars. poet. V, 304.)] - Note: Migne prints a row of spaced periods marking an ellipsis in the middle of the Horace couplet (Ars poetica 304–305, "fungar vice cotis, acutum / reddere quae ferrum valet exsors ipsa secandi"). The dots are the edition's own lacuna mark, not garbled type. Reproduced verbatim in place; the two italicized fragments of the couplet are kept as two lines and translated ("which can render iron / sharp, though itself having no share in cutting?").
## Col 1228D (chunk 0000) — minor typographical slip
- Reading (as printed):
latori praesentium corum quae penes nos habentur notulas compendiosas tradidimus - Note:
corumis a plain misprint for eorum ("of those") — the genitive governing quae penes nos habentur ("those things which are in our possession"). Rendered per sense ("brief notes of those things which are in our possession"); the Latin itself is not emended. Noted for completeness.
PL 196 polarity sweep (2026-07-28)
Sites found by the volume-wide sweep for sense-reversing defects (dropped or intrusive negations, and single letters that invert a claim). All are Migne's; all are rendered literally per Pattern 7. Entries already discussed above are repeated here so the class can be read in one place.
### 1225B — letter-inversion (medium confidence) Printed: Nam, ut aiunt illi, confirmaverunt vos divitiae, quas in schola et frequenti verborum commercio consuevistis canigenas appellare.
Conjecture: infirmaverunt vos divitiae
The sentence is introduced by 'Nam' as the ground of the clause immediately before it — 'ut sic erigeretur spiritus vester, qui divitiarum pondere dicitur opprimi, et amore episcopandi, et deliciarum affluentia INFIRMARI' — and 'ut aiunt illi' points back to those same reporters. What they say is that riches crush and weaken him; 'confirmaverunt vos divitiae' asserts the opposite of the infirmari it is offered as proof of, and the letter's whole burden is that wealth has undone the addressee.