[j.p.s]

I was recently watching a Lucy Worsley presentation on the norman conquest of England when the camera cut to a closeup of a tablet showing an english translation of a medieval latin book. (The setting for that scene was a table in some library or archive with said thousandish year old book open on the table.) Then I noticed it was a web page with an archive.org URL. Later the camera cut to the tablet showing the same or different book on archive.org, and this time I noticed a field with something about time remaining on borrow. I also wonder whether the episode was produced before the court ruling on whether archive.org could legally lend books under copyright without express permission or if some publishers of books do give permission to archive.org to lend books.

The same episode showed paper book translations of other books. Dr. Worsley mentioned something about not being comfortable enough with medieval latin to establish some of the subtle points she wanted to make. I've experienced trouble with books written in english as recently as 100 years before, but I've never considered that a book written around a thousand years ago might be too recent to fully comprehend compared to a book written 2000 years ago in the same or direct parent language. Kind of like Beowulf being easier for someone to read than The Canterbury Tales on an even longer time scale. (I can't read either of those myself, but had less trouble with The Canterbury Tales in high school.) So I also wonder if the difficulty with the medieval latin came as a surprise and it was necessary to scramble online for a translation.

(Note to those eager to take every single opportunity to denounce archive.org as copyright violators: Please refrain for a week or so to allow for a possible discussion of the actual topics of this thread and any natural drift.)