Published rights research for a work the Archive cites but does not reproduce.

Rights dossier — Clement of Alexandria, Stromata (ANF II, Wilson 1885)

Researched: 2026-08-12, RIGHTS-DOSSIER drip night 8. Ticket LS-320, queue position 5.

Verdict: CLEAR on rights — but the English is INCOMPLETE, and the missing part has no public-domain English anywhere. Stromata Book III is printed in Latin, not English, by the deliberate decision of the edition's own editors. That is a coverage gate the ticket did not anticipate and the single most important thing in this dossier.

1. The edition

The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, Volume II — Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Entire).

PD basis in one sentence: a US publication of 1885, reprinted 1913, both well before 1930, so the translation is public domain in the United States. Identical in kind to the basis already accepted for ANF vol. I (Barnabas, Justin) and vol. VI (Alexander of Cappadocia).

Read by eye

Title page — leaf n12: "THE ANTE-NICENE FATHERS. TRANSLATIONS OF The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. THE REV. ALEXANDER ROBERTS, D.D., AND JAMES DONALDSON, LL.D., EDITORS. AMERICAN REPRINT OF THE EDINBURGH EDITION. … BY A. CLEVELAND COXE, D.D. VOLUME II. … NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 1913."
Copyright page — leaf n13: "COPYRIGHT, 1885, BY THE CHRISTIAN LITERATURE PUBLISHING COMPANY."
Contents of Volume II — leaf n10: Clement's works begin at p. 163; The Stromata, or Miscellanies at p. 299; Fragments 569; Who is the Rich Man that shall be saved? 589.
Printed page 381 — leaf n394, the opening of Book III, read in full (see §2).

Leaf offset for this item: printed page + 13. Verified at p. 381 (leaf n394). Cached (gitignored) at data/raw/rights-2026-08-12/anf02_n{6,8,10,12,13,394}.jpg.

Contents of Clement's section, with page ranges from the source's own markers: Introductory Note 165–170 · Exhortation to the Heathen 171–206 · The Instructor 207–298 · The Stromata 299–588 (Bk I 300–346, II 347–380, III 381–408, IV 409–443, V 444–479, VI 480–522, VII 523–557, VIII 558–568) · Fragments 569–588 · Quis dives salvetur 589–605.

2. THE COVERAGE FINDING — Book III is in Latin

At printed page 381 the book heads "THE STROMATA, OR MISCELLANIES. BOOK III." and the text beneath it opens "Ac Valentiniani quidem, qui desuper ex divinis emissionibus deduxere conjugationes…" — Latin, with Latin chapter heads ("CAPUT I.—BASILIDIS SENTENTIAM DE CONTINENTIA ET NUPTIIS REFUTAT."). It stays Latin for the whole book.

This is not a scanning accident or an OCR misread. The editors say so themselves, in a footnote hung off the book title and read by eye on the page image:

"After much consideration, the Editors have deemed it best to give the whole of this Book in Latin. [In the former Book, Clement has shown, not without a decided leaning to chaste celibacy, that marriage is a holy estate… He now enters upon the refutation of the false-Gnostics and their licentious tenets… this Book, though necessarily offensive to our Christian tastes, is most useful as a commentary upon the history of monasticism… The resolution of the Edinburgh editors to give this Book to scholars only, in the Latin, is probably wise. I subjoin a succinct analysis, in the elucidations.]"

Extent. The Latin runs pp. 381–401. Coxe's own English "ELUCIDATIONS" — a chapter-by- chapter summary, not a translation — follow at pp. 402–408. English resumes with Book IV at p. 409. The volume's title page claim "CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA (ENTIRE)" refers to the corpus, not to the language: every work is present, one book of one work is not in English.

The same treatment reaches into the Instructor. Book II, chapter X — "QUÆNAM DE PROCREATIONE LIBERORUM TRACTANDA SINT" — is Latinised the same way at pp. 259–263, with English paragraphs interleaved between Latin ones, and a Coxe footnote at the far end marking the resumption: "He now continues the argument in a form which our translators do not scruple to English." So the exposure is two sites, not one, and the second is easy to miss because it is mid-chapter rather than a whole book.

Is there a public-domain English Book III? No.

The first complete English translation of Stromateis III is Oulton & Chadwick, Alexandrian Christianity (Library of Christian Classics vol. II, SCM / Westminster Press, 1954), pp. 40–92. 1954 is decades past 1930; J. E. L. Oulton d. 1957 and Henry Chadwick d. 2008, so UK life+70 runs to 2078. Not usable on any theory.
John Ferguson's Stromateis Books 1–3 (Fathers of the Church vol. 85, CUA Press, 1991) is likewise modern and in copyright.
The Edinburgh Ante-Nicene Christian Library (T&T Clark, 1867–69) that ANF reprints is the same text with the same Latin — the footnote above names "the Edinburgh editors" as the ones who made the decision, so going back to the Edinburgh printing does not recover an English Book III. It never existed there.

This is the Origen, On Prayer shape rather than the Bernard shape: not "the queued copy is the wrong translation, find a better scan", but no public-domain English text exists to find. The difference from Origen is that here it costs us one book of eight, not the work.

3. The CCEL text — same edition, same Latin, no defect of its own

CCEL's https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf02.xml transcribes this edition faithfully, Latin and all: its Book III carries the identical editors' footnote and page marker <pb n="381">. A CCEL-sourced build inherits the gap; it does not cause it.

Header, for the standing tally: anf02's ThML header is populated with authors, DC.Rights: Public Domain, and DC.Publisher: Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library — CCEL's own imprint. It names no translator (Wilson is absent), no print publisher, no print year. Same refinement as recorded for npnf201 tonight: populated ≠ evidence, because none of the populated fields is a print fact. Wilson's attribution here comes from the scan ("[TRANSLATED BY REV. WILLIAM WILSON, M.A.]", printed at the head of Clement's works and again at the Fragments), not from CCEL.

Transcription audit — RUN, CLEAN. Same instrument and calibration as the Eusebius dossier (§4 there; method and script in the 2026-08-12 addendum to npnf110-transcription-defect.md), CCEL anf02 against the antenicenefather02robe OCR:

| Division | CCEL words | chained | suspect holes | | :-- | --: | --: | --: | | Exhortation to the Heathen | 34,062 | 89% | 0 | | The Instructor | 82,774 | 82% | 0 | | Stromata I | 43,516 | 83% | 0 | | Stromata II | 31,617 | 84% | 0 | | Stromata III (Latin) | 19,709 | 54% | 0 | | Stromata IV | 32,291 | 85% | 0 | | Stromata V | 31,320 | 87% | 0 | | Stromata VI | 37,982 | 82% | 0 | | Stromata VII | 32,779 | 84% | 0 | | Stromata VIII | 9,183 | 93% | 0 | | Quis dives salvetur | 13,979 | 90% | 0 |

Book III's lower chain rate is the OCR of Latin being noisier, not a signal. Positive controls on Book V: a 700-word excision at word 15,000 is flagged at 14,960 (12/12 shingles absent), a 1,200-word excision at 8,000 is flagged at 7,960 (12/12). The negative is therefore an instrument-checked negative, bounded as in the Eusebius dossier at roughly the ≥500-word scale.

One minor CCEL defect found and worth recording: Book VII contains a page marker <pb … n="436"> inside chapter vii, where the surrounding sequence runs 523–557. A stray, almost certainly a typo for 536. Harmless to us (we do not address by print page), but a converter that trusts page markers for ordering would trip on it.

4. What I could not establish

Whether the Instructor II.10 Latinisation has further sites elsewhere in Clement. The volume was swept with a Latin-density detector at 8,000-character resolution, which found exactly two regions (Instructor II.10, Stromata III). A shorter Latinised passage — a sentence or two inside an otherwise English chapter — would fall below that resolution. Before publishing, run a per-paragraph Latin check, not a per-page one.
What the study Bible actually cites Book III for, if anything. If its citations concentrate in Book III we would be shipping a work that cannot answer them; if they avoid it the gap is cosmetic. Unanswerable from here — we do not hold that apparatus as data.
Nothing was published, transcribed, or written to any database.

5. Recommendation

Proceed, with the gap disclosed rather than papered over. Record provenance in work.yaml as: translator Rev. William Wilson, M.A., editors Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, American editor A. Cleveland Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. II, Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885 (this printing New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913); rights Public Domain; PD basis pre-1930 US publication. Cite IA antenicenefather02robe. titleEnglish: Miscellanies, unitNoun: book.

Gates:

The provenance note must state that Book III is Latin in this edition, and why — the editors' own decision, quoted or paraphrased. A reader who opens Book III and finds Latin with no explanation will reasonably think our transcription broke.
Decide Book III's disposition explicitly, and record it. Three defensible options: (a) publish the Latin as printed, labelled; (b) publish Coxe's English Elucidations (pp. 402–408) in its place, labelled as a summary and not as Clement's text; (c) omit the book with a stated gap. Do not silently drop it — the contents would then show Books I, II, IV… and look like a transcription failure. This is a founder-facing call, not a converter default.
The Instructor II.10 Latin is the sleeper. Whatever is decided for Book III must be applied there too, and it is mid-chapter with English on both sides.
Never translate the Latin ourselves, machine or otherwise. It would be a new translation of a Father published under our name, which is exactly the class of claim the standards forbid.
The transcription audit is done and clean — do not re-run it as a gate, but honour the per-paragraph Latin sweep in §4.
Citation-index note: the Stromata has no entry in the 308-row cited-sources manifest; Clement of Alexandria appears there only as paedagogus-clement-of-alexandria (2 citations). LS-320's "heavily cited by the study-Bible apparatus" is a claim about the founder's photographed abbreviations list, not about our index. If Clement is built, the Paedagogus is the work with citations attached — and it is in this same volume, on this same basis, pp. 207–298, already audited clean above. That is a free second work, and it is the one our own data asks for.

Sources

https://archive.org/details/antenicenefather02robe — the dated scan; title page (n12), copyright page (n13), contents (n10) and p. 381 (n394) read by eye
https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf02.xml — CCEL ThML; header read, text audited, Latin Book III confirmed present with the editors' note
Oulton, J. E. L. & Chadwick, H., Alexandrian Christianity (Library of Christian Classics II, 1954) — identified as the first complete English of Book III; in copyright, not usable