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. 0935C (head I) — mismatched bracket [Ex Mabill. Vet. Analect.)
The head prints an opening square bracket closed by a round parenthesis: RESPONSIO.[Ex Mabill. Vet. Analect.). Preserved verbatim in the head text (and in the copied frontmatter heads array). Not emended.
Col. 0935C–0936C (Odilbert letter) — anacoluthic sentence
The long sentence beginning "Quorum vos meritis et scientia praecellentes…" (from col. 0935D through the interpolated 0936B/0936C column jumps) never reaches a finite main verb — it runs on through participial and relative clauses. This is the source text's own broken syntax (the Ambrosian compiler's), aggravated by the vel caetera quae sequuntur abridgement at 0936B where Migne's editor has cut material. Rendered literally clause by clause, preserving the incompleteness rather than supplying a verb.
Col. 0937A — praesentiae [ Forte, prudentiae]
Migne's own conjectural variant, printed in the text: dignissimae praesentiae with the editorial note that prudentiae is perhaps the right reading. Kept verbatim and untranslated inside the brackets, on the same footing as [ al., …] variants; the main-text word rendered as printed ("presence").
Col. 0940B (head II & body, CAP. II) — quo [si] ordine debemus celebramus
The chapter title is grammatically corrupt: quo [si] ordine debemus celebramus mixes an editorial bracketed [si] with the ungrammatical pairing debemus celebramus (indicative where an infinitive celebrare is expected). The bracketed [si] is Migne's editor's insertion. Rendered literally, retaining the [si] bracket untranslated in the head, "in what order we ought [si] to celebrate." Not emended.
Col. 0940A / 0940B — editorial bracket [quia], [because]
At 0940B "quamvis corporaliter acta sint, [quia] aliquid divinitus significant" the [quia] is an editorial supplement; rendered as bracketed "[because]". Noted for consistency, not an error.
Col. 0940D — Desunt hic plurima.
Editorial note in italics closing the chunk ("Many things are wanting here"), i.e. the text breaks off. Translated as an editorial note, italics preserved — it is Migne's apparatus, not the author's prose.
<!-- 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.
0940B — dropped-word (ours, high confidence)
Printed: Baptismum Graece, Latine tinctio dicitur. Et ob hoc tinctio nominatur quia ibi homo Adae de peccato fuscatur.
Conjecture: Migne's plate prints fuscatur ('is darkened/blackened'), which asserts the opposite of what baptism does; the underlying sense requires a verb of cleansing (mundatur / purgatur / abluitur, or a lost clause of the type 'a peccato Adae, quo fuscatur, mundatur'). Our English silently repaired the plate by rendering fuscatur as 'is cleansed' — the translation now says the right thing while concealing that the printed Latin says the wrong thing. This is the 'silent repair' pattern of translation-style.md 7a.
The same chapter, a few lines later, states the opposite of 'is darkened': 'Nam sicut ex baptismo remissio peccatorum largitur, ita per unctionem sanctificatio sancti Spiritus adhibet' — 'For as from baptism the remission of sins is bestowed...'. The preceding chunk likewise defines baptism as the point at which 'infans ... salutaris ablutione lavacri peccatorum suorum purgationem adipiscatur' ('an infant ... obtains through the saving washing of the laver the purgation of its sins'). Baptism cannot both blacken a man with sin and remit his sins in the same paragraph; and the English, by writing 'cleansed', leaves no trace that the printed word was fuscatur.