Mosaic: a jewelled cross on a hill between two peacocks, on a gold ground

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The Migne Reading Room

The Fathers of the Church as Migne printed them: every page scanned, every column numbered, with the Latin and Greek set from the page and a new English translation beside it, growing volume by volume.

ProgressWhat is in the reading room

Already here: nearly the whole Patrologia, readable in one place. 365 of Migne's 382 volumes, about 258,000 pages, each scanned page shown beside its machine-read text and citable by Migne's own column numbers. Verified Latin, Greek and English fill in behind it, volume by volume.

Each square is one volume. Choose a stage to see how far each volume has come; click a square to read it.

nonebeguna quarter or morethree quarters or morecomplete

PlanWhat is planned

Everything printed on Migne's pages is kept, in layers: the author's text, the editors' notes and prefaces, and the page itself. The work goes in this order:

The whole collection, readable now. Every volume we hold, scanned, indexed page by page and column by column, with machine text marked as unverified.
Quick wins. Complete works that are already mostly translated: Clement's Letter to the Corinthians, Ignatius, Barnabas, Cyprian, Ambrose On the Mysteries, Cyril of Jerusalem's Mystagogical Catecheses.
The Fathers of the Office of Readings, complete. The writers the Church reads every day: Leo the Great (sermons done, letters under way), Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bernard, Cyprian, Ambrose, John Chrysostom.
Works cited by the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The Doctors of the Church, complete.
Everything else, with works of doubtful authorship last.
Then, across the whole: where Migne's text differs from better editions, which works are genuine, and translations into other languages.

Each column is read from the page image, set word for word as printed, and translated fresh; one column in twenty is independently re-checked. Our measured error rate is about one word in two thousand.

Library

Read by volume

Every scanned volume, page by page, with up to three panes side by side: scan, text, translation. First complete: PG 1, PG 2, PG 5, PG 10, PG 26, PG 33, PG 34, PG 99, PG 100, PL 1, PL 4, PL 13, PL 16, PL 53, PL 54, PL 87.

About

How it is made

Set by hand from the page, translated fresh, every column citable as Migne cites it.