Bill White is tracking down the freely available translations done by the Loeb Classical Library. I mentioned the Loeb in the post A Handbook for Latin Clubs, from 1916. Bill also notes that the Loeb will soon publish its five-hundredth volume, and he links to Sir Peter Stothard's column in the Times, Harvard and the money men, and the Telegraph's Wrestling with Latin and Greek by A.N. Wilson. PaleoJudaica.com notes the five-hundredth as well, at The Loeb Classical Library is Celebrating its 500th Volume.

The Loeb is on the 'net at Loeb Classical Library.


Loeb Classical Library books
The green are Greek, red, Latin.
English translations are on facing pages.

The BBC Radio Four programme In Our Time (was 'At That Time' taken?) airs Thursdays at 9.00-9.45 a.m., repeated 9.30 p.m. (all times GMT*). It's one of the podcasts to which I listen regularly (podcast subscription file here).

There aren't details about the program yet at the show's site, e.g., who the contributors will be, but the shows have all been of high quality, and they've been of the few which I've actually kept and not deleted after listening. Perhaps later today, details will be posted to the site.

For a week after the show being broadcast, it is available in mp3 format. After that time, the show is only available in .ram format, so for those shows, you'll need a computer program to do ram to mp3 or convert ram to mp3.

It feels peculiar to be blogging about something in the future.

* The site incorrectly calls it Daylight Savings Time.

Last Saturday, March 25, the Internet Archive released in .pdf, .djvu and FlipBook formats, the English translation of Pierre Battiffol's 1892 History of the Roman Breviary. This is before Pope St Pius X's revision, and I came across this on pages 237 and 238, in chapter V, 'The Breviary of the Council of Trent', discussing Cardinal Quignonez's 1535 tentative, proposed revision, to be used only for private devotion (footnote omitted). (Some other searches about this work here on google.) The 1527 Sack of Rome had dispersed the humanists engaged in an earlier revision of the Breviary.

But what a singular novelty, and no less dangerous than singular, to speak of reforms to be carried out by a return to antiquity, while what antiquity is meant is not expressed ! Was not this just such a way of speaking as had been employed by the German Protestant reformers? And this echo of their protestations, met with at Rome, is one indication among many of the fact that at a particular moment in its history this Roman Curia, itself so fiercely attacked by these violent theorists, was, after all, the medium in the whole of Catholicity the most attentive to their grievances, the most ready to listen to them, and to respond to their reproaches in a spirit of fairness. But it is also allowable to see in the liturgical experiment made by Cardinal Quignonez an individual approach on his part towards the spirit of the German reformers. It is this which gives its special interest to his work : this also which constitutes its secret and fatal vice.

Later, large numbers of priests in Italy, France, Spain and Germany were allowed this revision. St Peter Canisius propagated the revised Breviary in Germany, where Luther's influence was growing. The Jesuits adopted it on its publication.

From page 244 (footnote omitted):

[I]n Spain it was introduced into the choirs of several cathedrals : thus from private recitation it passed into solemn and public celebration. It was under these circumstances that the people of Saragossa, unable to recognise the office of Tenebrae one Maundy Thursday, and no doubt thinking that the Chapter had turned Huguenots, made an uproar in the cathedral itself, and went near to making an auto da fe of the canons and their new breviary. Thus these good folk defended in their own fashion the just rights of liturgical tradition.

On pages 246 and 247, Battifol quotes the Spanish theologian John de Arze's 1551 memorandum to the Fathers of the Council of Trent, urging repudiation of Quignonez's work:

Worse still, is it in this iron age, an age in love with the most dangerous novelties, when the ecclesiastical chant is mocked at, the canonical hours proscribed, the ceremonies of the Church despised, and her laws treated as mere human inventions, and that, too, all over the world, in Germany, in Switzerland, in England ; when even among ourselves, who adhere to the old faith, we see disgust for the usages of the Church freely expressed, a growing contempt for holy things, a more and more widespread audacity in judging, each man for himself, of dogmas and canons : is this the time to give up our liturgical traditions and seem tacitly to allow that our adversaries are right, when our first duty is to stand firm, and the more the state of ruin manifests itself among them, the more on our part to exert ourselves to uphold the tottering edifice (et quo plura apud eos cadunt, plura a nobis sunt substituenda)?

Battifol continues, on page 248:

[de Arze] conjures the Fathers of the Council to be on their guard against that innovating spirit which despises antiquity and takes up with novelties, some of them positively erroneous, all of them worthy of being suspected -the spirit which was so applauded in that century, and which, not content with giving birth in Germany to new rites, new chants, new hymns, new sacraments, new canons, new breviaries, was now endeavouring to gain credit among the orthodox themselves, and to bring to its full development among them also the mystery of iniquity : Caveant pastores !

The chapter continues with much interesting detail. Nihil sub sole novum.

On The Lion & the Cardinal.

By the way, what happened to his RSS feed? I get a 404 when trying it since March 21, so almost missed his request for information about the TLM at Baltimore's St Alphonsus.

Bill White, Lisp programmer, schola member, nearsighted(?) husband and father, etc., alerts us to the Project Gutenberg edition of this work.

From my ScrapBook grab of the old catholichaven.org site, part of Dom Guéranger's commentary for this Sunday is on this blog at The Second Sunday of Lent, and I reprduce it below the break. Today's Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion in mp3 format, chanted, can be downloaded from or listened to at Hebdomada tertia quadragesimæ Dominica.

I was reading Matthew Meloche's blog this morning. He is the organist for the Windsor, Ontario, Canada, Tridentine Mass, and his blog is The Dusty Choir Loft. Today's post, Tridentine Mass this Sunday, mentioned that he'll not be in Windsor this Sunday, but in London, Ontario, and he pointed to a post at the Thirsty Scribe, Efforts are underway in London, Ontario about the Mass there. That blog has another post, Video: Medieval Mass in Denmark.

First, go back to Recommendation: Cnytr's two posts on St Thomas Aquinas on this blog, for links explaining the fresco from Florence's S. Maria Novella, The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas below, and with a detail from another of the images below.

Today is the feast of St Thomas Aquinas. From breviary.net, here are Lessons iv v and vi for the feast of this Saint.

A quote from G.K. Chesterton's biography:

It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas that he loved books and lived on books; that he lived the very life of the clerk or scholar in The Canterbury Tales, who would rather have a hundred books of Aristotle and his philosophy than any wealth the world could give him. When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, "I have understood every page I ever read."

I've changed the commenting on the blog, using the Pivot-Blacklist code snippet add in.

If readers want to post a comment, they will need to answer a trivial question, currently 'What are the last two letters of the word 'tempore'?' Since yesterday's installation, it's already blocked one hundred or so poker-online gambling comment bots.