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

Rights dossier — Summa Theologiae (St. Thomas Aquinas)

Researched: 2026-08-09 Scope: summa-theologiae-ii-ii-st-thomas-aquinas and summa-theologiae-iii-st-thomas-aquinas (17 connections each, currently citation-only per the manifest), but the underlying rights question is answered for the whole work — see §1. Verdict: CLEAR.

Raw evidence (title-page transcriptions, full CCE search log): data/raw/summa-theologiae-rights-2026-08-09/evidence.md.

1. The manifest already covers the whole Summa Theologiae, not just these two slugs

apps/web/content/cited-sources/manifest.json carries five citation-only entries for this work (all category PATRISTICS, author "St. Thomas Aquinas"):

| Slug | Title | citedByCount | | --- | --- | --: | | summa-theologiae-i-st-thomas-aquinas | Summa theologiae I | 6 | | summa-theologiae-i-ii-st-thomas-aquinas | Summa theologiae I–II, | 7 | | summa-theologiae-i-ii-st-thomas-aquinas-2 | Summa theologiae I–II | 1 | | summa-theologiae-ii-ii-st-thomas-aquinas | Summa theologiae II–II, | 17 | | summa-theologiae-iii-st-thomas-aquinas | Summa theologiae III, | 17 |

That is Prima Pars, Prima Secundae (twice — -i-ii-... and -i-ii-...-2 look like a duplicate-slug data-quality artifact, not this dossier's problem to fix, but worth flagging to whoever owns the manifest), Secunda Secundae, and Tertia Pars. All four real parts of the Summa are represented. There is no separate slug for the Supplement (the ~99 questions on marriage, indulgences, purgatory, and the resurrection, compiled posthumously by Reginald of Piperno from Aquinas's Scriptum super Sententiis) — if a future connection cites Supplement material, it will presumably need to land under the III slug or a new one; that's an open question, not a rights problem, since the Supplement text sits in the same PD translation set addressed below.

Summa contra gentiles is a separate work (its own slug, citedByCount: 2) and is out of scope here.

Because one translation covers the whole Summa Theologiae as a single publishing project, the rights finding below is not per-slug — it clears the entire work at once.

2. Is there a PD English Summa? Yes — established from primary evidence

Translation: Literally translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Publishers: Burns Oates & Washbourne, Ltd. (London) and Benziger Brothers (New York, Cincinnati, Chicago), issued jointly. Publication: in numbered fascicles/parts from 1911 through 1925 (a second, revised edition of most parts appeared in the early-to-mid 1920s; an index volume closes the set in 1924).

Two title pages read by eye, covering different parts

Both read from the Internet Archive's OCR (djvu.txt) of the scanned book — the actual printed title and copyright pages, not a catalog record or an aggregator's metadata field.

Secunda Secundae, Questions 171-189 — IA identifier summatheologicas0000stth

THE "SUMMA THEOLOGICA" OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS Literally Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd. (28 Orchard Street, W.1, and 8-10 Paternoster Row, E.C.4) Benziger Brothers: New York, Cincinnati, Chicago 1922 [Second Part of the Second Part, QQ. CLXXI-CLXXXIX]

Tertia Pars, Questions 60-83 ("Treatise on the Sacraments") — IA identifier summatheologicao0000unse_y9e9

THE SUMMA THEOLOGICA OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS Literally Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province Benziger Brothers: New York, Cincinnati, Chicago 1914 [Part III, Third Number, QQ. LX-LXXXIII]

Both carry the identical translator credit and both are Benziger Brothers editions — i.e. the same translation, the same publishing project, sampled across two different parts eleven years apart. A third volume (the 1924 Index to Biblical, Patristic and Other Authorities, IA summatheologicao0022thom) confirms the joint Burns Oates & Washbourne / Benziger imprint was still current at the close of the run.

PD basis

Pre-1930 US publication. Both inspected volumes (1914, 1922), and every other volume of the original run located (1911-1925, see the full list in the raw-evidence file), predate 1931. Under the current 95-year term, anything published in the US in 1930 or earlier is public domain as of 2026 regardless of renewal. That makes the basis for these volumes doubly clean: PD by age alone, independent of whether Benziger or anyone else filed a copyright renewal.

Because the work was published simultaneously by a US house (Benziger Brothers) and a UK house (Burns Oates & Washbourne), it also qualifies as a "United States work" for the purposes of the URAA foreign-restoration provisions (17 U.S.C. §104A), so there's no separate foreign-copyright-restoration question to chase here — noted for completeness, not because anything above depends on it.

One later item surfaced and is flagged rather than relied on: an IA/bookseller record (bwb_P9-EFY-886_20) for a "Third Part," Burns Oates & Washbourne, dated 1932. This was not independently inspected — it looks like a later reprint of the same 1911-1925 translation (reprints of an already-PD translation don't create new rights over the underlying text unless the reprint adds copyrightable new matter), but if a 1930-or-later printing is ever the specific scan in hand, confirm by eye that it carries no separate copyright notice before relying on it. Recommendation: source from the pre-1930 fascicles, which are plentiful and sidestep this question entirely.

CCE renewal check

The task asked for a Stanford Copyright Renewal Database web search. The interface was inaccessible this session — every request (JSON, HTML, gallery view, and a direct record permalink) was intercepted by an Akamai/TSPD bot-detection challenge that neither curl nor the fetch tool could pass. This is a tooling failure, not a finding, and is recorded as such rather than silently skipped.

As a substitute, the Catalog of Copyright Entries was searched directly on archive.org (same method validated in rights-cpdv-and-confraternity.md's 2026-08-08 inspection: the book-interior fulltext endpoint, quoted-phrase queries only). Renewal windows: a 1922 work's 28th year is 1949-1950; a 1914 work's is 1941-1942.

  • "Summa theologica" and "Thomas Aquinas": zero hits in the 1942, 1949, and 1950 renewal-bearing volumes. (1941 has no searchable OCR on the one IA scan found — not checked by any method.)
  • "Dominican Province": zero hits in the 1949/1950 current-registration volumes.
  • Positive control: the same search surfaces real Benziger renewals when they exist — Benziger renewed St. John Berchmans (1949) and three other 1922 titles, Fairest Flower of Paradise, Mariquita, and Wonder Story (all 1950) — proving the method finds true positives and isn't just failing silently.

So: no renewal found, under either title-string, in the specific windows checked, against a publisher demonstrably renewing its own 1921-1922 backlist in those very years. This is useful corroboration but is explicitly not the load-bearing argument — it covers only two of the set's ~20 fascicles' specific windows, not the whole run, and it's a lighter-touch title-search rather than the page-by-page read the Confraternity dossier did. The load-bearing argument is age: every volume actually inspected predates 1931, so renewal status is moot for those volumes regardless of what a fuller search would show.

3. Scale, honestly stated

The complete Summa Theologiae (Prima Pars, Prima Secundae, Secunda Secundae, Tertia Pars, plus the Supplement) is commonly described as running to roughly 3,000 articles across several hundred questions — a large, secondary-source-level figure, not independently recomputed here. The English Dominican Province translation was issued as a run of roughly 20-22 numbered fascicles between 1911 and 1925 (later bound into 3-5 physical volumes by various reprint publishers — e.g., a 1947 Benziger "Complete American Edition in Three Volumes," a 1981 Christian Classics five-volume reprint). Whatever set of scans is used, this is a large, multi-year ingestion project, not a single-file source.

New Advent hosts a digital transcription of this same translation (newadvent.org/summa). Standing rule (founder decision, 2026-07-22, restated in LS-ARCHIVE-02 §6): never ship New Advent's revised text. New Advent's edits to the ED Province translation are not assessed here — none were fetched or compared for this dossier. If New Advent's HTML is ever used as a convenience layer (e.g., for structure or cross-references), any digital transcription must be fingerprinted against a dated primary scan (the IA fascicles above) before use, per the same hybrid-fallback discipline already documented in LS-ARCHIVE-02 §6.3 for the Fathers corpus. The basis for rights must remain the original 1911-1925 printed edition, not New Advent's site.

4. Recommended sourcing path for a future build

  1. Base text: the IA fascicles of the English Dominican Province / Benziger / Burns Oates & Washbourne edition, 1911-1925 (pre-1930 copies preferred per the doubly-clean basis above). Two are already confirmed usable and openly accessible: summatheologicas0000stth (II-II, QQ. 171-189, 1922) and summatheologicao0000unse_y9e9 (III, QQ. 60-83, 1914). A companion II-II fascicle, summatheologicas0000stth_p8v6 (QQ. 141-170, 1921), was located but not independently title-page-verified. The full set of ~20 fascicles would need the same identification-and-verification pass this dossier did for two of them before a real ingestion — this dossier establishes the rights basis, not a complete volume manifest.
  2. Structure maps naturally onto the address grammar already in use elsewhere in this repo (per LS-ARCHIVE-02): Part → Question → Article is a clean three-level hierarchy, directly analogous to how other multi-level classical works are addressed here. Each article further subdivides into objections / sed contra / respondeo / replies, which is exactly the kind of internal structure the existing citation-only manifest entries (citedByCount) are already pointing at by locus.
  3. Tier, per the SOURCE-REGISTRY.md rubric: page scans needing OCR (Tier C), same as most large pre-1930 sets. Given the number of independent fascicle scans on IA (dozens seen in this search across summatheologicao*, summatheologi*, in.ernet.dli.*, and bwb_* identifiers, from University of Toronto, DLI/India, and other contributing libraries), a witnessing approach (per witnesses.ts / SOURCE-REGISTRY §0) is viable for at least the heavily-scanned parts, the same way Buckley and the Catena Aurea were handled — but only within a single edition/printing, and the 1912 vs. 1920/1922 "second revised edition" volumes should not be pooled as witnesses of each other without confirming they're the same text (a revision could mean real wording changes, not just OCR noise).
  4. Gates before any transcription:
    • Confirm the specific fascicle(s)/questions being sourced by title-page inspection (as done here for two), not by trusting a generic "Summa Theologica" IA search hit — the search surfaced Latin editions, German editions, Migne editions, and 20th-century abridgments (Nature and Grace, Treatise on Law, the LibriVox audio adaptation) mixed in with the real target.
    • Do not use New Advent's site text as a source; if used at all, only for structure/ reference positions under the documented hybrid-fallback pattern, fingerprinted against a dated IA scan first (§3 above).
    • If a 1930-or-later printing is ever the specific copy sourced (e.g. bwb_P9-EFY-886_20), inspect its verso page directly for a separate copyright notice before treating it as interchangeable with the pre-1930 fascicles.
    • Treat the Supplement's manifest slug as unresolved (§1) — decide where Supplement citations land before ingesting Supplement text.

5. What was NOT established

  • The Stanford Copyright Renewal Database's web UI could not be reached this session (bot wall); the CCE substitute check above covers only two of the set's ~20 publication-year windows and is a title-string search, not a full page-by-page read.
  • The 1941 half of the earlier volume's renewal window has no searchable OCR on the one IA scan found and was not checked by any method.
  • No complete, verified inventory of all fascicles/questions with confirmed IA identifiers was built — two volumes (II-II and III) were independently confirmed by title page; the rest of the set was located by search and year-clustering but not individually title-page-verified.
  • The bwb_P9-EFY-886_20 1932 "Third Part" printing was not inspected; its status (plain reprint vs. carrying new matter) is unconfirmed.
  • New Advent's transcription was not fetched or fingerprinted in this dossier — that check is deferred to whichever future work actually proposes using it as a structural aid.
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