ACTA SANCTORUM IN ENGLISH — RIGHTS AND REUSE
Copyright © 2026 Wilson Pruitt. A Wroot Press work; Wroot Press is an
imprint of Wroot Labs LLC (Texas).


1. WHAT IS PUBLIC DOMAIN

The Latin text of the Acta Sanctorum as published by the Bollandists, and
the Paris edition reprints used here, are in the public domain. No claim is
made over them. A faithful transcription of a public-domain text creates no
new copyright, and none is asserted here.

The machine-readable Latin used as a base was digitized by the Ökumenisches
Heiligenlexikon (heiligenlexikon.de) and supplemented by manual
transcription from the Paris edition. Credit for that digitization belongs
to them; this project claims nothing over it.

Anyone is free to take the Latin and do anything at all with it.

NOTE ON LATER VOLUMES: the Bollandist series ran to 1940, and the October
and November volumes are recent enough that their editorial matter may
still be in copyright in some jurisdictions. Translation work on those
volumes should confirm the status of the specific volume before publishing.
This does not affect January through September, which are unambiguously
public domain.


2. WHAT IS LICENSED

The following are original work and are licensed to the public under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
(CC BY-NC 4.0):

  (a) The English translation of the Acta Sanctorum, in whole and in part —
      vitae, passiones, miracle collections, translation accounts, and the
      Bollandists' own critical commentary.

  (b) The editorial apparatus: headnotes identifying each saint, genre, and
      BHL number; the Propylaeum matter; the devotional selections; and all
      introductory and explanatory text on the site.

  (c) The structured corpus — that is, the original selection, arrangement,
      and encoding of the texts, including: the calendar-and-day
      organization into addressable sections; the saint identification,
      splitting, and slugging; the segmentation into text sections and
      chunks; the marginalia and marker inventory; the alignment of English
      to Latin; and the editorial corrections recorded in CORPUS-DEFECTS.md.

  (d) The site design, typography, stylesheets, and build scripts.

Item (c) is claimed as a compilation and database — the arrangement and the
encoding, not the underlying text. Extracting the Latin is free (§1);
extracting this project's structure, segmentation, and alignment is not.


3. WHAT CC BY-NC 4.0 PERMITS

You may copy, redistribute, excerpt, translate, remix, and build upon the
licensed material, in any medium or format, for NON-COMMERCIAL purposes,
provided you give appropriate credit, link to this license, and indicate if
changes were made.

Non-commercial means not primarily intended for or directed toward
commercial advantage or monetary compensation. Teaching, preaching, private
study, scholarship, parish use, and free public reference works are all
clearly within it.

Full license text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


3a. MACHINE USE — EXPLICITLY PERMITTED

Use of the licensed material (§2) to train, fine-tune, evaluate, or ground
machine-learning systems, and to build retrieval indexes over it, is
permitted under §3 — INCLUDING for commercial model development. This is a
deliberate carve-out from §4: training or grounding a model, even a
commercially offered one, is not treated as the kind of commercial use
that requires asking. Keep the attribution (§5), and say if you changed
the text. Crawl it, index it, quote it. A bulk export is available at
/export so crawling the site is not even necessary.

What §4 still reaches, unaffected: reselling the text itself — a print or
ebook edition, a paywalled database, a commercial reference product with
the text inside it.


4. COMMERCIAL USE — ASK

Commercial use requires written permission. This includes print or ebook
editions offered for sale, subscription or paywalled databases, and
inclusion in commercial software or reference products.

Permission is not hard to get, and is given readily for scholarly and
ecclesial projects. Write to wilson@wrootlabs.com.

The copyright holder retains all rights and is not bound by this license;
Wroot Press publishes print editions drawn from this material.


5. SUGGESTED ATTRIBUTION

  English translation from the Acta Sanctorum by Wilson Pruitt (Wroot
  Press), licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. Latin source: public domain, digitized by
  the Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon.