The Vulgate Latin Course is a small book in three parts aiming to cover basic Latin, leading up to a fruitful reading of the Bible. Examples are taken from the Vulgate. The level is aimed at Upper Elementary as envisioned back in 1874.
The story goes that this gentleman, Matthew Arnold, Esq., in the course of his inspections of Her Majesty’s Schools in 1871, expressed a hope that Latin will be much more studied and even adopted as part of regular instruction in the upper classes of all Elementary Schools. He suggested that the best way to do this would be to take examples from the Latin Bible, or Vulgate, instead of the current trend to focus on the History of Rome and classical texts.
William Dodds, Master of Wragby Grammar School, took up this idea and produced this book. You can download the scanned book at the Europeana. It is marked as “copyright”, although being first published in 1874, it is hard to figure out why this is. I am guessing that the scans themselves may be copyright, but to retypeset the material therein should be fine.
So, some years ago, I set about typing the Whole Thing.
Now I am nearing the completion of the task.
Please check my work.
At first I tried to combine the three parts as in the original book. As time progressed it seemed that separate books would make them easier to refer back and forth between the parts and also ease the technical side of arranging glossaries and so on. Here is a link to the old project.
And here are the latest copies of the three parts:
This is a Kids Chant project.