Lumen de Lumine

Text and Translation Policy

Original English preserves the witness’s substantive wording, older spellings, names and foreign-language quotations. Long s is transcribed as s; line-end word divisions are joined; typographic ligatures and abbreviated Latin endings are expanded where their reading is clear. Ordinary page breaks are not sentence breaks. Italic and capital emphasis is not treated as a secret code or exhaustively imitated as a facsimile. Verse lineation is retained where it carries the form of the passage.

Modern English updates spelling, pronouns, obsolete senses and difficult sentence structure without shortening the argument. It preserves examples, comparisons, qualifications, polemic, quantities and directions. Unfamiliar technical terms remain where a confident modern equivalent would narrow or distort the claim. Natural philosophy, magical art, spirit and medicine are read in their historical contexts rather than automatically identified with present-day disciplines or therapies.

Latin, Greek and Hebrew in the historical text receive English translations in the modern reading. Where Vaughan already supplies an English version of a Latin passage, both historical presentations are retained in their original order: the resulting repetition belongs to his volume. The new translation of the Latin can therefore differ in wording from the modernisation of Vaughan’s own English. Notes distinguish translation, quotation, paraphrase and uncertain attribution where that distinction matters.

The Latin Bodley poem is translated in full as verse, with its conceits retained rather than forced into rhyme. The twelve final aphorisms preserve their numbering, paradoxes and compressed relationships. Greek letters and alchemical vocabulary are kept in the original text when legible and translated or explained in the reading text. The edition does not repair an obscure original into unwarranted certainty.

Historical marginal references and notes appear as labelled source units with their own modern equivalents, rather than being silently absorbed into Diotimos commentary. Reproduced image labels have a complete transcription and English key. Editorial headings that divide a long continuous discourse are identified as navigation, while historical headings retain their distinct status. LL identifiers and modern source locators are editorial additions.

The image witness governs over automated transcription. Where binding, worn type or a printing irregularity affects a reading, the note records a material uncertainty or a supplied reference. This edition is not a facsimile and does not reproduce every change in type size, ornamental border, signature, catchword, running title, library mark or endpaper annotation. Those exclusions concern book furniture and later copy history, not omitted historical arguments.