18 August 2022 back to the topical index.

Perhaps one of the most astonishing stories in the history of publishing is that of J. P. Migne, whose life story is retold in R. Howard Bloch's God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne (1994).

In the nineteenth century, Migne, a French priest, undertook to try to publish the entire collection of Christian writings (excluding the N.T.) in Greek and Latin preserved from the dawn of Christianity to about the thirteenth (for Latin) or fifteenth (for Greek) centuries.

The 221 volumes of Latin writings can be found online here, and 161 volumes of Greek writings (with Latin translations!) here. There has never been anything like such a comprehensive collection produced before or since, and for many of the more obscure Greek and Latin works out there, Migne is still the best source.

It is worth noting that so far no full translation of Migne's series is available in English. Producing it would be a worthy but massive project. Alas, I am too busy with work and my other projects to do such a thing.

I have translated one little scrap of Migne material: pdf-anonymous-chronicle.pdf.

This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.