I’ve just uploaded a file containing the Latin text, with a translation, of 47 of the miracle stories of St Nicholas which are found in medieval manuscripts. These are BHL 6130-6147 inclusive. A couple of the texts I have transcribed from manuscripts online. Most are from the Bollandist catalogues of the Brussels and Paris libraries, or from early editions. The translations are basically from Google Translate, but I have at least read over them and fixed some obvious errors. As usual I put this file and its contents in the public domain – do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial. Just don’t put your own copyright notice on my work, thank you.
Here are the files:
I’ve also uploaded them to Archive.org here.
I made this file while working on the Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon. In the manuscripts this gets tangled up with all these texts, and it gets fairly confusing. With this file, all I have to do is a Ctrl-F Find, and I can at once see just what the page of text in the manuscript image in front of me belongs to.
There are still more miracle stories to do, but I ran out of puff at this point. Maybe one day I will return to it and add more! Or maybe not.
“don’t put your own copyright notice on my work”.
A purely hypothetical question, prompted by thoughts on the recent plagiarism scandals and #ReceptioGate: if someone were to take your text and emend it, how many changes would they have to make before it could be considered to be “their” work?
The correction of a single mistranslated word might completely change the meaning of a paragraph, or of an entire legend: so the the size of the change might be very small, but it might have the effect of transforming the entire text.
Of course the reviser should *cite* your work, but could they justifiably claim copyright?
That sounds like a question for a cooyright lawyer, to be honest, so I can only think aloud here a bit. Derivative works based on a public domain source can certainly be copyrighted; but the copyright on a derivative wouldn’t mean anything to me. If they changed one word, and claimed copyright on the result, then they could. But of course the unchanged version would still be public domain.
I wouldn’t be difficult to people doing this, myself. So long as they don’t stop me doing what I do, then I don’t care. I’d encourage people to do this, even. Do fix my translations, and if publishers need to own the copyright, do so. The more the merrier.
I get very few citations, as far as I know, but then I don’t really care either. There is neither money nor fame in all this, and I care about neither anyway. So long as what I do pushes the boat along a bit further, then that’s all I hope to achieve.