The short version: on this site, unusually, both languages are free without condition. What is licensed is only the scaffolding we built around them.
Milton died in 1674. Charles Sumner’s edition of the Latin and his English translation of it were both published in 1825 and are long out of copyright. Transcribing a public-domain text faithfully creates no new copyright in it, and nothing here pretends otherwise.
Most editions of this kind can claim the English, because the English is new. This one cannot, because it isn’t. Take the Latin. Take Sumner’s English. Print them, sell them, put them in an app, feed them to a machine. You need nothing from us for either one.
A scan of two nineteenth-century volumes is not a usable edition, and the distance between the two is where all the work in this project went. What is claimed here, as a compilation and as original scholarship, is:
- The structure.The book–chapter addressing scheme and its slugs, the chunking, the paragraph segmentation, and the alignment of each English paragraph to its Latin — which is what makes the two columns readable side by side rather than two separate books.
- The citation index.Every scriptural reference in both layers, parsed out of Milton’s and Sumner’s abbreviations, normalized, resolved to a book and verse, and given a stable deep link — several thousand of them, together with the paired records that show where the two layers disagree.
- The Junius–Tremellius division data.Where a copy of the 1603 Hanau Bible was opened, which leaf was read, where that Bible divides the chapter, and what that division explains — recorded as evidence, one entry at a time. This is not in any edition of Milton, because nobody had needed it in this form before.
- The editorial text. The notes, the headnotes, the explanations on the scripture pages, and the prose on this site, including the About page.
All of that is offered to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution‑NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Lifting the text is free. Lifting our addressing, our alignment, and our index is not.
Yes, freely, and there is no need to ask. Quote a chapter in a sermon or a lecture. Assign a book to a seminar. Cite the citation index in a dissertation. Build a study guide you give away. Translate our notes. Correct us and publish the correction. Mirror the whole site. Just credit the work, link the license, and say if you changed something.
Ask first. Selling our edition— a print or ebook made from these files, a paywalled database, a commercial product with our index or alignment inside it. Note again that this does not restrain you from selling Milton or Sumner: set the 1825 text yourself and it is yours to do as you like with.
Asking works. Permission is given readily, and given free for scholarly and ecclesial projects. What the license is for is the case this project exists against: the reprint shops that would scrape a corpus like this one and sell it back to the people it was made for. Write to wilson@wrootlabs.com and say what you have in mind.
Anything along these lines will do:
Parallel edition, citation index, and notes to Milton’s De Doctrina Christianaby Wilson Pruitt (Wroot Press), licensed CC BY‑NC 4.0. Source text: C. R. Sumner’s edition and translation, Cambridge, 1825, public domain.
This edition is a working draft and should be cited as one. See About for what is finished and what is not.
This is a Wroot Press work; Wroot Press is an imprint of Wroot Labs LLC. The copyright holder retains all rights and is not bound by this license — Wroot Press publishes print editions drawn from this material, which is part of how the work gets paid for. The full legal statement lives in the LICENSE file in the project repository.