Methodology

USTC Statistics (as of 2025)

• 1.65 million editions catalogued
• 7 million surviving copies located
• 10,000+ libraries, archives, and museums worldwide
• 500,000+ digital links to scanned copies

Source: USTC About Page

Editions vs. Works: Our Analysis

The USTC counts editions (individual printings), not unique works. A popular text like Cicero's De Officiis might appear in 500+ editions. To estimate unique works, we analyzed the USTC Latin dataset:

The ~150,000 unique author+title pairs is our best proxy for "works," though this still overcounts because:

• Same work with variant titles counts multiple times
• Spelling/abbreviation differences across editions
• Anonymous works harder to deduplicate

Conservative estimate: 80,000–120,000 unique Latin works in USTC. This means the average work was reprinted ~5 times, though the distribution is highly skewed—canonical authors have hundreds of editions while most works have just 1–2.

Analysis: Computed from USTC Latin export (December 2025) using author_name + std_title deduplication.

The Philological Museum

Dana Sutton's Philological Museum at the University of Birmingham is a major open-access resource. It contains critical editions of ~200 British neo-Latin texts (plays, poems, letters, essays) from the 16th–17th centuries, most with facing-page English translations. The associated Analytic Bibliography indexes 79,760 neo-Latin texts freely available online (though most are Latin-only scans without translations).

A Gap in Research Infrastructure

No comprehensive database exists of which Latin works have been translated into English. The series counts above are our best effort to estimate coverage, but they represent a patchwork, not a systematic catalogue.

Existing resources fall short:

• Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum — tracks Latin translations of Greek classics, not translations from Latin
• UNESCO Index Translationum — only covers 1979–present, not historical translations
• Publisher series catalogues — scattered across dozens of presses with no aggregation

Building this database is a potential output of this project. Cross-referencing USTC records with translation series catalogues would produce the first comprehensive map of what's accessible.

This estimate has significant uncertainty. Without a systematic catalogue, we cannot know the true number.

Translation Coverage of Unique Works

Given our estimate of ~100,000 unique Latin works in USTC and ~1,500–2,000 translated works, translation coverage is approximately 1.5–2% of unique works. The vast majority of Renaissance Latin literature remains untranslated.

Corpus Size

The Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) Latin Texts database contains 362 authors and claims to include "essentially all Latin literary texts written before A.D. 200"—approximately 7.5 million words. This represents the "canon" of Classical Latin literature.

Translation Coverage

For this canonical subset, translation coverage is genuinely high. The Loeb Classical Library provides 200–250 Latin volumes, Aris & Phillips has published 160+ volumes, and major authors (Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Livy) exist in multiple competing translations.

Important Caveat

The ~80% figure applies only to major literary works. The full Classical Latin corpus is far larger: the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum catalogs 180,000+ inscriptions, with fewer than 500 translated online (<1%). Including inscriptions, fragments, technical literature, and documentary papyri, coverage of the complete Classical Latin corpus is perhaps 15–25%.

Corpus Size

The Clavis Patrum Latinorum (CPL) lists 2,348 entries for Latin Christian texts from Tertullian to Bede, with each entry often subdividing into dozens of individual sermons, letters, or treatises. The Patrologia Latina comprises 221 volumes totaling over 177,000 pages.

Translation Coverage

Major English translation series have produced approximately 350–400 volumes combined: Fathers of the Church (147), Ancient Christian Writers (~72), Ante-Nicene/Nicene-Post-Nicene Fathers (38), Popular Patristics Series (63), and Corpus Christianorum in Translation (49).

Scholarly Estimate

One scholarly assessment states: "I would venture to guess—but a studied guess—that 60–70% of the extant patristic literature has never been translated into English." Even Augustine—with 132 works totaling 5 million surviving words—achieved his first complete English translation only through the ongoing New City Press project (44–45 of 49 planned volumes as of 2024).

Corpus Size

The scale of Medieval Latin defies easy quantification. Sharpe's Handlist of Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland alone identifies 5,200+ Latin works—and covers only the British Isles. A 2009 study by Buringh and van Zanden estimated that 2.9 million medieval manuscripts survive globally.

Translation Coverage

Major translation series have produced perhaps 250–350 Medieval Latin volumes over six decades: Oxford Medieval Texts (100+), Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (~41 Latin volumes), Toronto Medieval Latin Texts (37).

Scholarly Estimate

A 2023 scholarly assessment from Found in Antiquity states: "I have heard it estimated that over 90–95% of our surviving Latin texts remain untranslated... The percentage of literary texts from Antiquity and even more so from the Middle Ages that have never been translated into any modern language is overwhelming." Even Thomas Aquinas—arguably the best-translated medieval author—has "a substantial amount" of writings still untranslated per the Oxford Handbook of Aquinas.

Corpus Size

The Universal Short Title Catalogue now contains 1.65 million editions for 1450–1700. Our analysis identifies ~533,000 Latin editions, representing approximately 80,000–120,000 unique works after deduplication. The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin notes that the Neo-Latin corpus "is currently simply unquantifiable" but "dwarfs that of Latin in all other periods combined"—approximately 95% of all extant Latin texts date from the Renaissance onward.

Translation Coverage

Translation resources remain modest: the I Tatti Renaissance Library reached its 100th volume in March 2025; the Collected Works of Erasmus has published 66 of 89 planned volumes for one author's output alone. A realistic count of English translations yields 1,500–3,000 works.

Calculation

Applying our methodology: 2,000 translations ÷ 100,000 unique works = ~2%. If using the full USTC scale (650,000+ Latin editions), the figure drops to ~0.3%. The 2% estimate is conservative.

The Translation Decay Curve

As the volume of Latin texts increases exponentially through history, the percentage of available translations drops precipitously:

All figures are order-of-magnitude estimates with substantial uncertainty (±50%). No systematic scholarly survey of translation coverage exists for any period.

• 70,000+ transcribed and encoded texts
• 1 billion+ searchable words
• 99.995% accuracy (double-keyed transcription)
• ~60,000 texts from EEBO-TCP specifically

Source: TCP Website

Critical Limitation

EEBO-TCP focuses on English-language books from the British Isles. Latin works from continental Europe—the vast majority of Latin printing—are not covered by TCP transcription efforts.

We report translation rates rather than work counts on the homepage because the numerator (translated works) is more tractable than the denominator (total works by field).