The Truth of the Christian Religion with Jean Le Clerc's Notes and Additions

A Note on he Text

a note on The text The impetuous flood of editions of Grotius’s De Veritate shrinks to a trickle from 1950 onward. A facsimile reprint of the first English translation (London, 1632; probably based on the Leiden Latin edition of 1629) was published in Amsterdam and New York in 1971. An Italian translation by Fiorella Pintacuda De Michelis—based on the text of De Veritate in Grotius’s Opera omnia theologica (Amsterdam, 1679) but excluding the extensive notes added by Grotius in 1640—appeared in 1973. Finally, a photographic reproduction of the 1818 edition of John Clarke’s translation was published in 2004. The current edition presents John Clarke’s English translation of 1743 of Jean Le Clerc’s definitive Latin edition of 1724. It does not attempt to provide a critical edition of a text with so many and such complex layers of revisions, additions, and corrections by Grotius, Le Clerc, and Clarke. Its aim is much more modest: namely, to help the modern reader appreciate a classic work that had a massive impact on western culture. This aim is pursued in the “Authors and Works Cited by Grotius and Le Clerc” (pp. 299–332), via the identification of the authors and works mentioned by Grotius and Le Clerc in their countless allusions and more or less implicit references, and in explanatory annotations to the text itself. Given the already formidable apparatus of notes by Grotius, Le Clerc, and occasionally Clarke, I have kept my own annotations to a minimum. John Clarke’s translation, although far from blameless, has been treated as a period piece in its own right. I have therefore limited my interventions to silently correcting only clear typographical errors. ...