Finding Aquinas In Latin

A reader writes:

Hello, I’m having trouble finding anyone who sells books by St. Aquinas in the original Latin. Do you know who sells them? Thanks.

I’m not aware of a bookseller specifically devoted to this, but here’s what I’d do:

1) If you’re looking for books that are in print, I’d check Amazon.com as my first stop. It might not have the ones you’re looking for, though, since books by Aquinas in Latin are likely to be by smaller, academic, or overseas publishers, and Amazon don’t always carry those. (Which is the publishers’ faults, not Amazon’s.)

2) If you’re looking for out of print books or used but in-print books, I’d contact THOMAS LOOME BOOKSELLERS and ask them what they have in stock.

On the other hand, if you don’t really need books by Aquinas in Latin but just texts by Aquinas in Latin, his whole corpus is available online and available for download.

FOR EXAMPLE, HERE.

Hope this helps!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

13 thoughts on “Finding Aquinas In Latin”

  1. The laudable Blackfriars edition of the Summa with Latin on one side and English on the other (a la Loeb Classical Library) has just been republished. Check out this link for the first in the 60+ volume series.

  2. Back in the 1980s I got a one-volume Summa Theologiae in Latin from the Daughters of St. Paul bookstore in San Francisco. The publisher was Editiones Paulinae.
    Also, Casa Editrice Marietti has editions of all if not most of his works.
    http://www.mariettieditore.it/

  3. Newman Bookstore is unfortunately not as reliable as it used to be. For used and sometimes cheaper copies I recommend abebooks.com much more than Amazon.
    Also, I do not recommend the 60-volume Blackfriars Summa. The translation is inconsistent and frequently very loose. The older anonymous English translation is much more reliable.
    I have the aforementioned one-volume Latin Summa as well. The text is the Leonine; it’s frequently reprinted; I would recommend that one. For a more convenient version see if you can find a copy of the five-volume pocked-sized Biblioteca Auctores Cristianos edition. For some reason vol. 3 seems particularly hard to find (I stumbled across mine by accident in a used bookstore).

  4. I haven’t tried this site out much on the technical Latin of the Dumb Ox, but I’ve put together a little tool that’ll hyperlink an entire text into various Latin dictionaries so a limited vocabulary won’t so hinder one’s reading. It’s over at http://www.semi-fluent.com

  5. Just the other day at the library of Regis College (University of Toronto) I saw an old Latin volume of the Summa on sale for 50 cents.

  6. Here’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I think its not too of topic to post it here. Is there any place one can get the texts of the various councils on-line in their original languages? How about other texts such as encyclicals and whatnot as well?
    Is there a Project Gutenberg/CCEL type resource with these things anywhere that anybody knows of?

  7. Gadzooks, Jackson! $10,000 for a copy of the Summa? Those who would truly appreciate the text would not, by definition, be able to afford it.

  8. [quote]Here’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I think its not too of topic to post it here. Is there any place one can get the texts of the various councils on-line in their original languages? How about other texts such as encyclicals and whatnot as well?[/quote]
    Doesn’t the [url=http://bav.vatican.va/en/v_home_bav/home_bav.shtml]Vatican Library[/url] have most of this online?

Comments are closed.