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.

Church Fathers

Tap a verse number for the Patres panel — the Church Fathers and classic Catholic commentators on that verse, English first with the Latin where we have it. Each father is a card: swipe (or use the arrow keys / chevrons) to move between them, and tap the counter to jump to any father. The panel can be dragged taller or expanded to a wide reading view, and its header carries a link glyph to copy the verse permalink. In Lege you can set the fathers to read Latin-first and choose how much commentary is kept for offline reading. The commentary is drawn from three public-domain sources: the HistoricalChristianFaith Commentaries Database (a verse-keyed corpus of patristic and medieval exegesis), the Haydock Catholic Bible commentary (1859), and Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea in John Henry Newman’s 1841–45 translation with the parallel Latin, digitised at isidore.co. Authors are filtered to a Catholic-authority allowlist. A small number of entries were machine-translated from Migne’s Patrologia by the upstream corpus; these carry a versio automatica badge.

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)

Commentary

Public domain (HistoricalChristianFaith; Haydock, 1859; Newman’s Catena Aurea translation, via isidore.co)

Typefaces

SIL Open Font License (EB Garamond, Cardo)

Site code

MIT

Contact

Corrections, questions, or a note about the printed edition: salve@pocketvulgate.com.