Latin Reader.

The Vulgate as a Latin reader. Twenty-one stories you already know, from the Creation to the Empty Tomb, in the Latin that was the Bible of the Western church for more than a thousand years, with a small English gloss printed beneath every single word. Because the plot never surprises you, your mind supplies the sense while your eye learns the grammar.

Biblical Latin is more direct than the literary prose of Cicero: short clauses, concrete words, sentences that begin with et. Students working through Wheelock, Henle, Lingua Latina or Latin for Children will recognise every construction they have met, now in living use. Latin has no articles and shows the job of each word by its ending, so where it helps the glosses make that visible with a hyphen: Dei is OF-GOD, hominibus is TO-MEN, and a verb with no stated subject names its person, so dixit alone is HE-SAID. Nothing is smoothed away and nothing is rearranged.

The Latin is the Clementine Vulgate, the 1592 edition as printed in 1598, in the public domain. The glosses are an original translation, checked word by word against the Douay-Rheims, the English Bible translated from this very Latin, so the English never argues with the page. Each story is the passage itself, not padding: Babel stops where Babel stops. Ten of Doré's engravings and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Burning Bush accompany the stories.