De textu
Pocket Vulgate serves the complete Latin Clementine Vulgate — 73 books, 1,334 chapters — as a quiet, free, ad-free reader. This page records exactly what it is built from, so you can trust the text and check the work.
The Latin text
The text is Michael Tweedale’s edition of the Clementine Vulgate (the “Quasimodo” release of the VulSearch project), transcribed and proofread by a team of volunteers and released into the public domain. It received the approval of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales in 2006. It is the same text the printed pocket edition is set from, so the book and the screen never disagree.
Tweedale’s structural markers — the brackets that frame the elevated passages (the Johannine prologue, the Psalter) and the hemistich slashes — are normalized into flowing prose here. The traditional liturgical space before : ; ? ! is preserved; it is part of the Clementine’s typographic register, not an error. A small errata overlay corrects known transcription slips; corrections are tracked in the source repository.
Word definitions
Tap or long-press any Latin word for a gloss. The definitions come from William Whitaker’s Words (public domain), pre-computed for every surface form in the corpus and served as a static dictionary — no tracking, no network round-trip per word. Where Whitaker has nothing, the word is shown plainly with sine glossa; proper nouns and rare forms fall in that gap.
Typography
Body text is set in EB Garamond; chapter and book titles in Cardo. Both are licensed under the SIL Open Font License and self-hosted, subset to the Latin ranges, so the page loads fast and works offline once cached.
Licenses
- Latin text
- Public domain (Tweedale / VulSearch)
- Definitions
- Public domain (Whitaker’s Words)
- Typefaces
- SIL Open Font License (EB Garamond, Cardo)
- Site code
- MIT
Contact
Corrections, questions, or a note about the printed edition: salve@pocketvulgate.com.