Patrologia Latina

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Patrologia Latina

Patrologia Latina , abbreviated to PL or ML (for Migne Latinus ), is the abbreviation for the series of publications published by Jacques-Paul Migne on the Latin writings of ecclesiastical writers from the beginnings to the time of Innocent III .

Origin and structure

The Patrologia Latina , the full Latin title of which fills an entire print page in quarto format , is due to Mignes’s intention to make the entire traditional Latin literature of the Church from the fathers' days and the Middle Ages accessible to the clergy and interested believers of his time in an inexpensive print edition. The huge project then had to be limited to the period up to the beginning of the 13th century, because the inclusion of the late Middle Ages would have gone beyond the scope of the enormous literary productivity of scholasticism. Migne also had to forego a thorough inspection and comparison of the already existing prints or even manuscripts, but was only able to reprint a selected print more or less incorrectly in most of the works. Despite its serious shortcomings from the point of view of philological text criticism , the Patrologia Latina remains an outstanding editorial and publishing achievement, from which patristic and medieval studies benefit to this day.

The first edition of the Patrologia Latina was printed from 1844 to 1855 in 217 quarto volumes. It arranges the printed works in the chronology of their creation and is divided into two series: The series prima (volumes 1–73, printed 1844–1849) covers the first six centuries from Tertullian to the beginning of the time of Gregory the Great and pushes in theirs last volume the Vitae patrum after the edition by Heribert Rosweyde . The secunda series (volumes 74–217, printed 1849–1855) begins with the works of Gregory and ends in volume 217 with Innocent III. Four volumes with indexes (volumes 218–221) were added in 1862–1865, which require great patience and willingness to learn from the user, but are an indispensable aid.

Migne reprinted a part of the series until 1865 and then sold the rights to the Garnier publishing house, which continued the reprint until 1880, interrupted by a fire in 1865 that destroyed Mignes' printing plates. Since these reprints and all other Garnier reprints differ in their column counting and are considered to be of inferior quality, the first edition should be used and cited whenever possible.

Electronic edition

An electronic full-text edition , the Patrologia Latina Database (PLD), has been published by the British publisher Chadwyck-Healey since 1993 in several editions on CD-ROM and in 1997 in an online database for a fee. The publisher is a team of American scientists led by Mark D. Jordan . The electronic text is based on Mignes' first edition. Since automatic text recognition was not possible due to the poor print quality , the publisher initially had two teams of Indian data typists with no knowledge of Latin create two independent electronic copies, which were then compared with each other and with the print edition. The electronic text is coded in SGML and is electronically searchable , including the indices, notes and forewords . Because of its high price, which was £ 25,750 when the CD-ROMs were released and was still almost 10 percent of the purchase price for online subscriptions, the PLD is usually unaffordable for private individuals and can only be consulted in well-funded libraries or universities .

Electronic texts from the Patrologia Latina have also been included in the Library of Latin Texts (LLT) , formerly CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts (CLCLT) , which is published by the Center “Traditio Litterarum Occidentalium” in Turnhout in cooperation with the Brepols publishing house.

How to quote

The Patrologia Latina is quoted using one of the usual abbreviations with the number of volumes and columns. The mostly two-column mirror is often subdivided into four equal-sized horizontal sections A, B, C and D by means of outline letters in the space between the columns, which can be added to the number of columns when citing shorter text passages to make it easier to find the cited text passage. Examples:

PL 70, 43-47
PL t. LXX, c. 43–47 (with abbreviations for tomus = band and columna = column)
PL 70, 46B (for volume 70, column 46, column section B)

Aids for use

  • Ad utramque JP Migne Patrologiam Supplementum sive Auctarium Solesmense. Series liturgica E typographes Sancte Petri de Solesmis, Solesmes 1900
  • Palémon Glorieux, Pour revaloriser Migne: tables rectificatives . Facultés catholiques, Lille 1952 (= Mélanges de science religieuse, Cahier supplémentaire, 9)
  • Adalbert-Gautier Hamman (ed.), Patrologiae Latinae Supplementum . Garnier Frères, Paris 1958–1954, 5 vols.

See also

Web links

Digital copies of the Patrologia Latina
Information on the Patrologia Latina