The short version: the Latin is free without condition. The English is free for everything except selling.
The Latin Is Public Domain
The Acta Sanctorum as the Bollandists published it, and the Paris edition reprints used here, are long out of copyright. Transcribing a public-domain text faithfully creates no new copyright in it, and nothing on this site pretends otherwise. Take the Latin and do as you like with it — sell it, fork it, print it, feed it to a machine. You need nothing from us.
The machine-readable Latin that this translation was built from was digitized by the Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon, supplemented by manual transcription from the Paris edition. Credit for that digitization is theirs, and this project claims nothing over it.
One caution for anyone continuing the work: the Bollandist series ran to 1940, and the editorial matter in the October and November volumes is recent enough that it may still be in copyright somewhere. January through September are unambiguously clear.
The English Translation Is Licensed
The translation is new — some thirty-three million words of it, rendered from twenty-two million words of Latin. So are the editorial headnotes identifying each saint, genre, and BHL number, the Propylaeum matter, the devotional selections, and the explanatory text throughout the site.
So, less obviously, is the structure: the organization of the calendar into addressable days and sections, the identification and splitting of individual saints, the segmentation of the text, the marginalia and marker inventory, the alignment of each English passage to its Latin, and every correction recorded along the way. That structure is the difference between a pile of scanned folios and something a person can actually read and cite. It is claimed here as a compilation — the arrangement and the encoding, not the text underneath. Lifting the Latin is free. Lifting our segmentation, alignment, and apparatus is not.
All of it is offered to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution‑NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
So, Concretely
Yes, freely, and there is no need to ask. Quote a saint's life in a homily. Assign a passion to a class. Post a translation to a parish website. Cite it in a dissertation. Put a whole vita into a study guide you give away. Translate our English into another language. Correct us and publish the correction. Mirror the entire site, if you worry it might vanish. Just credit the work, link the license, and note if you changed something.
Ask first. Selling it — a print or ebook edition offered for sale, a subscription or paywalled database, a commercial reference product or piece of software with the translation inside it.
Asking works. Permission is given readily, and given free for scholarly and ecclesial projects. What the license is actually for is the case this site exists against: the commercial databases that have kept the Acta behind a login for a generation, and the reprint shops that would scrape a corpus like this one and sell it back to the people it was made for.
Write to wilson@wrootlabs.com and say what you have in mind.
Attribution
Anything along these lines will do:
English translation from the Acta Sanctorum by Wilson Pruitt (Wroot Press), licensed CC BY‑NC 4.0. Latin source: public domain, digitized by the Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon.
This is a Wroot Press work; Wroot Press is an imprint of Wroot Labs LLC. The copyright holder retains all rights and is not bound by this license — Wroot Press publishes print editions drawn from this material, which is part of how the translation gets paid for. The full legal statement lives in the LICENSE file in the project repository.