Traditional Theology Books - Latin / English

  • Thread starter Thread starter Iotaunum
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
I

Iotaunum

Guest
There have been many threads on this forum recommending traditional Catholic books and I do not intend on starting another one. I have been collecting traditional theology/philosophy books written in Latin for some time now, and I can say that learning Latin was one of the best things I have ever done. However, I would like to share these books out with other people I know who are interested in Catholic Theology, but the problem is they do not read Latin and have no intention of learning it.

I wonder, would there be a demand among traditional Catholics to have these older Latin works translated into English for those who do not read Latin. I think it would be very beneficial. I realise there are one or two - like Tanqueray etc but most remain out of reach for those who do not read latin or don’t want to learn it. I have checked out a few, and there does not seem to be any English translations. Does anyone else know of any books of this kind which have been translated into English? Also, does anyone know if there are any older Latin theology books being reprinted?
 
I’m proficient in Latin. I’m not sure of any specific theological works other than those of Thomas Aquinas, but, for a Latin reader, the best investment that can be made is JP Migne’s Patrologiae Cursus Completus w/ Latin translation (you can save a couple of thousand dollars and 80 volumes if you can read Greek as well), a complete collection of every document of the Church Fathers, councils, and many ecclesiastical writers and saints up until the time of Trent. 168 volumes, hardcover, University of Michigan press in America (I think it’s 242 with Latin translations).
 
Khalid said:
I’m proficient in Latin. I’m not sure of any specific theological works other than those of Thomas Aquinas, but, for a Latin reader, the best investment that can be made is JP Migne’s Patrologiae Cursus Completus w/ Latin translation (you can save a couple of thousand dollars and 80 volumes if you can read Greek as well), a complete collection of every document of the Church Fathers, councils, and many ecclesiastical writers and saints up until the time of Trent. 168 volumes, hardcover, University of Michigan press in America (I think it’s 242 with Latin translations).
Click to expand...
I would love a hard copy of Migne’s Patrologiae, but unless I win the lottery I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon! Also, I only read very basic greek so I would have to stay with the translations.
 
I got my full copy of Migne used in readable condition, all pages, not crumbling, spines intact, for $4,200 USD (Latin and Greek version). I imagine it would cost another $4,000 if you had to ship it from America, or, for that matter, probably $1,000 from anywhere outside the UK.

A hard copy you say - are the Patrologiae available online? Where?
 
Khalid said:
I got my full copy of Migne used in readable condition, all pages, not crumbling, spines intact, for $4,200 USD (Latin and Greek version). I imagine it would cost another $4,000 if you had to ship it from America, or, for that matter, probably $1,000 from anywhere outside the UK.

A hard copy you say - are the Patrologiae available online? Where?
Click to expand...
The Documenta Catholica Omnia website has digital copies, but I don’t know whether it is complete:

documentacatholicaomnia.eu/1815-1875,_Migne,_Patrologia_Latina_01._Rerum_Conspectus_Pro_Tomis_Ordinatus,_MLT.html

There is also another website which has electronic copies:

pld.chadwyck.co.uk/

I think you can also buy at least some of the volumes for digital readers - ebooks. However, as good as digital copies are I think most people would rather be holding a hard copy.
 
Oh yeah. I feel absolutely kick-arse whenever I see two five-tier metal bookshelves almost completely full holding a century old matched set of the Patrologiae. It’s impressive even to me (who knows what other people would think, even if they didn’t know it was Greek and Latin - “Renaissance man classicist who speaks English like a cab driver* - no!”). I’ve never liked reading on a Kindle (and, often, for new books, the Kindle is more expensive than a hard copy, let alone a used hard copy, and the majority of older, especially specialized, books are not available at all), except for old books, such as Aquinas, Augustine, Shakespeare, etc.

*Cabs in America, unlike in England (or at least London), are generally driven by immigrants, almost always Middle Eastern or North African, who have little knowledge of English, very heavy accents, nor the routes to take, and are constantly getting lost or referring to GPS. I was struck speechless by the professionalism of the “hacks” in London.

I want dead tree in hand, even though so much more can go wrong (font size, weight, size, bad binding, printing errors, damage, printing too close to gutter, lines too long, etc.), but even more can go wrong on the Kindle from what I can tell, with all of the errors and scanning artifacts I’ve seen in the “old” books that are very expensive in paper (like Summa Theologiae, $200, with too-close text printed with zero gutter margin, bad binding) and cheap or free in Kindle, or the Kindle Shakespeare I bought to try to improve my English (I can’t read Shakespeare even with updated spellings, as my non-native English still wasn’t that good - since then I’ve been able to read several of his plays and get the gist of them, even if not puns).

The artifacting in the Shakespeare was so bad that it was unreadable, the navigation was terrible, so on and so forth, so I just went and bought a copy of a 11-by-9 inch, 3-inch thick Beveridge Shakespeare of the Fourth Revised Edition in nearly “mint” condition for $8.99 including shipping used (it’s a Shakespeare with lots of notes and glosses for the harder English) - that cheap because schools probably assign the new “Sixth Edition” instead. The “Ultimate Shakespeare, 218 works, including apocrypha, plays, sonnets, blah blah blah” (that was the actual title, except it was about two full lines long and obviously unprofessional - a professional title should have been “Complete Works of Shakespeare [or even “Ultimate Shakespeare: His Complete Works”]. Digitized Riverside/Norton/Beveridge/Arden Edition.”) was $3.99 to start with.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top