The Latin and the Greek are public domain
Everything Migne printed is out of copyright, and so are the editions he reprinted. Copying a public-domain text faithfully does not create a new copyright in it, and this project does not pretend otherwise. Take the Latin. Take the Greek. Sell it, fork it, feed it to a machine, print it and put your own name on the spine. You need nothing from us.
Two upstream digitizations deserve their credit, and their terms travel with the text. The Greek for the OCRized volumes comes from the CGPG corpus — Calfa GREgORI Patrologia Graeca, led by Jean-Marie Auwers at UCLouvain — released under CC BY 4.0; if you reuse that Greek, credit them and say that it was changed. The Latin comes from the University of Zurich's Corpus Corporum, encoded in TEI by Ph. Roelli. Nothing here is a claim over their work.
Our English, our notes, and our encoding are licensed
The translations are new. So are the headnotes, the “On this text” apparatus, the Migne biography, and the volume and author introductions. So — less obviously, and this is the part that took the years — is the structure: the work-keyed store and its CPL/CPG identifiers, the volume-and-column citation scheme and the machinery that resolves it to a URL, the placement of every column anchor inside the text, the segmentation of works into sections, the author normalization, the tracking of Migne-original against Garnier-reprint column numbering, and each correction made against the plates.
That structure is the difference between a scan and a library. It is claimed here as a compilation — the arrangement and the encoding, not the text underneath. Lifting the Latin is free. Lifting our keys, anchors, and segmentation is not.
All of it is offered to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution‑NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
So, concretely
Yes, freely, no need to ask. Quote it in a sermon or a homily. Assign it to a class. Post it to a parish site. Cite it in a dissertation. Copy a whole treatise into a study guide you give away. Translate our English into another language. Correct us and publish the correction. Mirror the thing entire, if you fear it will vanish. Credit us, link the license, and say if you changed anything.
Ask first. Selling it. A print or ebook edition for sale, a subscription or paywalled database, a commercial reference product or piece of software with our text inside it.
Asking works. Permission is given readily, and it is given for free to scholarly and ecclesial projects. What the license is really for is the case this whole site exists against: the commercial databases that have kept the Fathers behind a login for a generation, and the reprint shops that would scrape a corpus like this one and sell it back to the people it was made for. Write to wilson@wrootlabs.com and say what you have in mind.
Attribution
Anything in this form will do:
English translation and structured text from migne.app (Wilson Pruitt, Wroot Press), licensed CC BY‑NC 4.0. Latin/Greek source: public domain.
Migne is a Wroot Press
work; Wroot Press is an imprint of Wroot Labs LLC. The copyright holder
retains all rights and is not bound by this license — Wroot Press publishes
print editions drawn from this material, which is part of how the
translation gets paid for. The full legal statement lives in the
LICENSE file in the project repository.