Episode 108: Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville and the Etymologies

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 108: Isidore of Seville. There are some books in history that are famous, and been famous all along, like the Bible, and the Aeneid. Then, there are books that were obscure for long, long decades, only to be decreed masterpieces later, like Moby-Dick, and long before it, Beowulf. But there is a third category of book, too. Some books were stupendously popular for decades, and even centuries, having entire traditions orbit around them and casting webs of influence far and wide, before later being largely forgotten. Just so, some places and times in world history – in between times that hinge different eras together, and some cultures in world history, however influential they were for centuries, after the Medieval period, and the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and deep into the centuries of Modernity, are just footnotes for us today. Our story in this episode is about one of those books, produced by one of those cultures.

This program is on the Late Antique bishop and scholar Isidore of Seville, and Isidore’s Latin-language encyclopedia, the Etymologies. Isidore spent his life and career in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, in the kingdom of the Visigoths, during a formative period of history there. As Visigothic Spanish kings slowly assumed control over the entirety of modern-day Spain, devout members of the Catholic clergy there, including Isidore’s family, worked hard to change Visigothic leadership from the Arianism to Roman Catholicism, and in 589, they were successful. Isidore himself, however, isn’t famous for steering the Visigoths toward orthodoxy. Today, we know him as the author of about 24 books, the most famous of which, by far, was the Etymologies. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, done toward the end of his life in the 620s and 630s, was, aside from the Bible, possibly the most influential book in the Latin speaking world for close to a thousand years. A thousand manuscripts of it survive today from nearly every territory and century of the Latin Middle Ages, and thus in its ubiquity, during the medieval period, at least, the Etymologies achieved a popularity and circulation greater than any other work we’ve read in this podcast, apart from the Bible.

In this episode, we will first take a few minutes to learn about Visigothic Spain during the 500s and 600s CE, with the aim of getting a sense of the world in which Isidore lived. Then, we’ll consider the wide body of works that Isidore wrote, focusing mainly on the Etymologies. Before any of that, though, let me give you a quick explanation of our main course for today – Isidore’s Etymologies. The Etymologies is essentially an encyclopedia. Running perhaps 800 or 900 pages in length if given a pagination and word count standard to today’s print practices, the Etymologies offers a survey, organized by topic over the course of 20 books, of a huge array of subjects, including grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, medicine, law, the church, geography, human anatomy, astronomy, geology, agriculture, architecture, and more. Although “encyclopedia” is a decent description of Isidore’s Etymologies, there are two ways in which Isidore’s Etymologies isn’t quite an encyclopedia by modern standards. First, it is not alphabetized, but instead organized by bundles of topics. As such, it is possible, even for a modern reader, to peruse an entire book of the Etymologies from end to end. Second, as the name of Isidore’s encyclopedia implies, it frequently emphasizes etymology – in Isidore’s case, the etymological roots of Latin words. As an example, under the heading for “Toga,” the same word in Latin as in English, Isidore first tells us that it comes from the Latin verb tegere, which means “to cover.” Then he offers a few more details about togas, and that’s the end of the entry. All of Isidore’s most famous book’s entries are like this – etymology first and foremost, and then a few extra details, and then onto the next.

In creating the Etymologies, Isidore borrowed from dozens of authors before him, aiming to create an end product that was useful, written in clear, simple Latin, and as comprehensive as was reasonably possible. He was neither the first nor the last person to write an encyclopedia – we’ll discuss the long traditions of the genre a bit later. His magnum opus was far from perfect, containing some very iffy etymologies as well as ancient superstitions that are now difficult to take seriously. But on the whole, the sensible organization of Isidore’s etymological encyclopedia, together with its lucid style, the breadth of what it covered, and its serendipitous position of being authored between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages all helped it become one of the most widely circulated books in history. So, let’s begin today’s program by talking about Isidore’s world. This is a world we can loosely call Visigothic Spain, or more appropriately the Visigothic Kingdom, as its borders expanded and contracted variously over the 300 years of its existence between roughly 415 and 715 CE. [music]

Visigothic Spain, 560-660

When we learn about the barbarian confederations responsible for the collapse of the western Roman empire, at the top of the list are the Visigoths. In the year 376 CE, along with other Gothic compatriots, Romans permitted the Visigoths to cross south over the Danube and take up residence in the north Aegean territory called Thrace. Following wars against the Romans in the late 370s, the Visigoths became an internal but unassimilated population in the late Roman Empire. Visigoths began occupying important roles at all levels of the Roman military, but prejudices against them at the imperial level eventually led to the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410. After 410, the Visigoths made their way up into southern Gaul, and the next few generations of Visigoths, by 500, secured control of the southwest of modern-day France, and much of the Iberian Peninsula. Their territories were reduced substantially, however, when they lost a battle against the Frankish King Clovis in the year 508, after which the Franks held Aquitaine. Visigothic territories contracted. Though the Visigoths still held most of modern-day Spain and much of what’s today France’s Mediterranean coast, the next generation of Visigoths found new adversaries in the Ostrogoths over in Italy, who secured de facto or direct control over the Visigothic throne from 511 until 548. And in 548, the Visigothic Kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula found still another major rival in the Byzantines. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian, though he was almost 2,000 miles away over in Constantinople, was, during the middle part of the 500s, bent on recovering all of the Roman territories lost during the 300s and 400s. The Byzantines managed to retake a region of Visigothic Spain called Baetica – this was basically the region of Andalusia along the central southern Spanish coastline, about a hundred and fifty miles from north to south at its widest point, encompassing the cities of Málaga, Seville, Córdoba, and Granada. The establishment of the Byzantine enclave in Baetica around 550 marked a low point in the fortunes of the Visigothic Kingdom.

Like so many regions of the former Roman Empire after its collapse, Visigothic Spain was a fractious territory.¹ As Merovingian Kings in Gaul were facing uprisings by unassimilated indigenous principalities and powerful coalitions of nobles, the same thing was happening in Spain over the 540s and 550s, with Visigothic control over the region gradually falling away due to a patchwork of uprisings and aristocratic power grabs. It didn’t help that a central divide existed in Visigothic Spain in the mid-500s, a divide that we should learn about now.

When we say “Visigothic Spain” today, there is a natural temptation to picture a place where Visigoths outnumbered all previous inhabitants of the old provinces of Hispania, having supplanted the old Roman population when they took over. As we’ve learned in previous episodes, in the Late Antique world after the fall of Roman imperial rule, Roman institutions, administrative districts, city governments, and above all Roman people of all stamps continued to persist and flourish. A handy term for the actual majority population of the Iberian Peninsula during Isidore’s lifetime – again he lived from about 560-636 – is “Hispano-Roman.” Hispano-Roman people, who lived among the same amphitheaters and porticos and aqueducts as they had long before, were the Visigoths’ subjects.

The Hispano-Romans of the mid-500s were, first of all, part of a politically distinctive class. Hispano-Romans were not allowed to marry Goths, according to centuries-old traditions that dated back to the edicts of the Roman Empire. Laws against exogamy, at least during Isidore’s youth, kept the ruling Visigoths in separate households and communities from their diverse Hispano-Roman subjects. And another difference drove a wedge between colonizers and colonized during Isidore’s early life. The Visigoths were Arians, or Christians who did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, but instead believed that Jesus was Yahweh’s son and a lesser and younger deity than his father. Compared with the Visigoths, Hispano-Romans were much less likely to be Arians. While the theological differences between these two groups involved relatively fine points of theology, naturally, religious differences deepened rifts between different clans. The fissure between Arian and Nicene Christians was two centuries old by the time Isidore was born, and it was part of the culture and politics of Visigothic Spain.

Isidore, then, was born into a fissured kingdom around 560. With Byzantines holding the southern coast, various unruly principalities having seized northern territories, a whole independent region called the Kingdom of the Suevi anchored in the northwest, and an internal population that lacked cohesion, the Visigothic Kingdom’s days, in the year 560, may have seemed numbered. And yet when Isidore was a child, in the year 568, a king called Liuvigild, came to the throne. An active military leader, between 570 and 578, King Liuvigild reimposed Visigothic control over the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula and wrested territories from Byzantine control in the southwest, as well. The south-central part of the Peninsula had become a marchland between the Byzantine enclave and Visigothic leadership, but in 572 Liuvigild managed to retake Córdoba, pushing the Byzantine enclave southward and eastward to a narrow belt along the coast. Most importantly, King Liuvigild managed to annex the northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula, that large territory called the Kingdom of the Suevi, in 585. This part of Iberia had never been a part of the Visigothic dominion, and its conquest meant that Visigoths controlled all of modern-day Spain other than that aforementioned crescent of the southeastern Spanish coast that the Byzantines, to flash forward, would hold until 624.

So to summarize, between 568 and 586, King Liuvigild, a strong, capable military leader, led the Visigothic Kingodom. Visigothic Spain had looked like a corroding piece of Swiss cheese when Liuvigild came to the throne in 568, and when he completed his reign in 586, all of modern-day Spain and Portugal and the southern coast of modern-day France up to the city of Montpellier were under his control, excepting that pesky little Byzantine dominion along the coast. Not all of King Liuvigild’s reign, however, was marked by such consistent success.

For much of the history of Visigothic Spain leading up to Isidore’s childhood in the 560s, Catholic subjects of the Visigoths were given relatively free reign to worship, to correspond with the papacy and other major bishoprics, and to convene synods. However, the powerful King Liuvigild, just as he had extended Visigothic military authority, also wanted to expand Arianism throughout the Iberian Peninsula. The King’s tools for proselytization were not particularly heavy handed – the king began holding synods in Spain, he appealed to Catholics to convert to Arianism, and at a council in Toledo in the year 580, he tweaked Arianism’s Christological doctrine slightly to emphasize that the father and the son were equal – it was just the Holy Spirit who was lesser in stature. Liuvigild’s efforts to turn the tides against Roman Catholicism, however, were unsuccessful. And the story of why, during the crucial years of the 580s, Visigothic Spain went Catholic, instead of Arian – this story actually has to do with Isidore and his family. [music]

Isidore, Leander, and the Transition to Catholic Spain

Early in Isidore’s life, his father, Severianus, had moved the family from the southeastern coastal town of Cartagena all the way to the western side of Andalusia, to the town of Seville, perhaps due to the Byzantine presence on the southeast coast of the peninsula. Seville, which was called Hispalis in Roman times, being on the Guadalquivir River close to where it empties into the Atlantic, had been a hub of Rome’s Spanish provinces since the late Republican period, enjoying trade with North Africa, the Western Mediterranean, and the Atlantic coast. By the time Isidore moved there, the city had been an outpost of Roman civilization for over six hundred years. We don’t know how or why, but Isidore’s parents passed away while he was still a child, leaving him under the care of his older brother Leander. And while Isidore was a scholarly powerhouse, his brother Leander seems to have been quite an exceptional person, as well.

Leander, before 580, had become the Bishop of Seville.² As a churchman, Isidore’s older brother Leander was no monkish isolationist, but instead an energetic, politically capable networker who ended up having an impact on world history every bit as great as Isidore’s own. Leander’s close friendship with the much-celebrated Pope Gregory the Great gave him ties to the center of the Roman Catholic world. But much more pivotally, Leander’s connections with key Visigothic leaders changed the history of the Iberian Peninsula. Earlier, I mentioned how the Arian King Liuvigild, who reigned from about 568-586 over the Visigoths, tried to nudge the kingdom toward Arianism. One of the reasons that this venture was unsuccessful was Isidore’s brother Leander.

Leander, by around 580, had become friends with both of King Liuvigild’s sons. The elder son was Hermenegild. Hermenegild married a young Frankish princess in 579. Hermenegild’s father Liuvigild, seeking to groom his eldest heir for leadership, dispatched Hermenegild to the borderland city of Seville, just upriver from the border with the Byzantine enclave. Perhaps old Liuvigild thought his eldest son would continue military efforts to subdue the whole Iberian Peninsula. Instead, something else happened. The Visigothic heir made friends with Leander, the Bishop of Seville and our author Isidore’s older brother. And young Hermenegild converted to Catholicism.³ Defection from his father’s Arian faith was then followed by outright rebellion. In the early 580s, Hermenegild sought support from Byzantine and other allies against his Arian father, but he didn’t have any luck. Relations with his father worsened, and in 585 – the same year that old King Liuvigild finished his territorial expansions of Visigothic rule in Spain, he had his son Hermenegild executed. Bishop Leander was exiled for his role in the Visigothic heir’s defection.

Fortunately for old King Liuvigild, there was another heir – a young man named Recarred. Recarred came to power in the year 586 when his father Liuvigild passed away of natural causes. And the next year, Recarred became the first Visigothic king to formally renounce Arianism for Catholicism. He did so, like his brother, under the influence of Bishop Leander of Seville, who returned from exile to his bishopric after King Liuvigild’s death, and worked side by side with the new King Reccared to help promote Catholicism in Visigothic Spain. King Reccared, or Reccared I, ruled from 586-601. After becoming king, Reccared pressed the Arian population of Spain to convert to Catholicism. Two years after Recarred’s conversion, a gathering called the Third Council of Toledo took place. And this 589 council officialized the conversion of the Visigothic Kingdom from Arianism to Catholicism. Following the council, Reccared started compelling and incentivizing Arian bishops to convert to Catholicism, and giving Catholic clerics decisive power throughout the Visigothic kingdom. Naturally, there were holdouts who resisted this partnership between church and state, and surely some Arian believers were disinclined to Catholicism’s Christological doctrines. But 589, a handy year to remember, historically marks the watershed moment that Visigothic Spain, one of the last holdouts of the more diverse world of early Christianity, fell in line with the newer orthodoxies of Roman Catholicism. To this day, Spain remains a rather Catholic place.

The newly enthroned Visigothic King Reccared, like his Merovingian counterparts up in Gaul, had compelling political reasons to join with the Catholic church. Numerous soft power advantages were available to Catholic monarchs who partnered with Rome, not the least of which was the right to appoint Catholic bishops to dioceses and thereby control the ecclesiastical leadership of the kingdom. In turn, the church was able to secure control over certain secular officeholders in Catholic kingdoms – district judges, for instance, or treasurers in charge of the finances of a bishopric. The partnership between Reccared and Rome ended with the king’s death in 601, but its impact was profound. Over the first few decades of the 600s, Arianism sputtered out in Visigothic Spain. It had faded out a century earlier in Gaul after the conversion of Clovis. And thus Catholicism had become the de facto state religion of modern-day France and Spain by the early 600s. It was also just starting to be seeded up in Britannia, with Pope Gregory the Great’s program to convert the Anglo-Saxons beginning in 596 – over the next few decades bishoprics would begin to fill some of the defunct Roman administrative districts of Britannia.

And as Catholicism washed over the previous theological rifts of Spain, something else happened in the 610s, 620s, 630s, and 640s on the Iberian Peninsula. For centuries, those of barbarian backgrounds, and those who considered themselves Romans of various stamps, had held one another at arm’s length. They had been, either through explicit legislation, or cultural prejudices, discouraged from marrying one another. They had historically been governed by different law codes. But as the 600s passed – as Isidore’s generation, and the next two came of age, the old rift between Roman and barbarian could not survive the extinction of Rome and the rise of new provincial nobilities whose identities were rooted in region and kingdom rather than centuries-old institutions and rivalries. A new law code, completed in 654 – about twenty years after Isidore’s death – demonstrates the progress of cultural amalgamation in Spain around this time. In the year 560, when our author for today was born, Hispano-Romans and Visigoths were governed by different laws. A century later, in 660, the Liber Iudiciorum, or Lex Visigothorum, portions of which still survive today, put all citizens of the Visigothic Kingdom under the same set of regulations. Among the many changes evident in this new law code are expanded roles for the nobility. The old Roman offices of duces provinciae and comites civitatis, by 660, had largely become medieval Europe’s dukes and counts, with the Visigothic nobility holding rights and responsibilities over various squares of the Iberian checkerboard while their monarch, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes not, ruled the nobility.

Isidore and his famous brother Leander, like other figures we’ve met from Late Antiquity during this season, were part of a pivotal moment in European history. When they were born, their region was a religiously diverse territory ruled fractionally by an autonomous barbarian monarchy. When they died, Visigothic Spain had become religiously and politically unified, its monarchy had built various interdependencies with the Catholic church, and these changes had in turn effaced previous fissures between Goths and Romans. This change was nothing less than the final transition from the fragmented world of Rome’s collapse to the brickwork of the early Middle Ages, with the bricks being various kingdoms and dynasties, and the mortar being the clergy. As scholars Calvin Kendal and Faith Wallis put it in a recent essay on Isidore, when we consider his life and times, “a persuasive argument can be made that the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh centuries marks a watershed. . .between the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.”⁴ And central to this transition was the clergy. Catholic bishops, among them Leander and Isidore themselves, would prove to be the community leaders of Europe for centuries to come. Some of them, like Leander, were ambitious politicians and power players, unafraid of networking within the perilous world of kings and heirs in order to advance the central mission of the church. Others, though, in addition to their clerical responsibilities, shared something with Leander’s younger brother Isidore of Seville. They were scholars – scholars who used their considerable educations and the occasional free time permitted to them by their professions to read, to write, and to set down bookish work for posterity. [music]

Isidore of Seville’s Education and Career

Let’s talk, now, about Isidore himself. The exact nature of Isidore’s education remains a mystery. Schooling in the muscular young kingdoms of Late Antiquity was in a transition phase. Rome’s urban centers had long had schools and networks of paid tutors, but various upsets to the provincial social order after the year 400 had sent this system into a tailspin. By 570, when Isidore was a child in Seville, carrying his study materials to class, the Catholic church had stepped in to provide basic educational services, in no small part because it needed a professional clergy fluent in Latin and capable of offering doctrinally correct and up-to-date sermons. A church council held in Toledo in the year 527 actually holds the first mention of education in Catholic canon law, describing a pressing need to repair defunct schools and to establish new schools in areas where there aren’t any.⁵ A slightly later synod in Toledo in 531 set out regulations that required schooling to take place in cathedrals. Thus, four decades later, when Isidore began his own education, it’s reasonable to assume that he went to the cathedral school in Seville, or some other educational institution affiliated with church leadership there. His brother would have already been involved with the church, and like other families we’ve met in Late Antiquity who were both aristocratic and clerical, Isidore’s path was probably pointed in the direction of the clergy from a very young age.

It’s fascinating to think of what, say, eight to eighteen-year-olds were learning in Visigothic Spain in the 570s, when Isidore was undertaking his education. Classical learning, though mainly in Latin, still had some momentum during this period, at least in elite ecclesiastical circles. Isidore is an exceptional case, as we’ll soon see – his level of erudition was unique even for an aristocratic urban bishop, and he probably made use of monastic networks in order to get a hold of rare books and scrolls.⁶ While Isidore’s learning was a rare case, even the workaday churchman and layman of Visigothic Spain, if he had any formal education, still enjoyed a wide sampling of classical Latin authors and texts. These classical Latin authors and texts, however, had new books that went along with them. The years between the Augustan Age and the death of Augustine of Hippo in 430 had swelled with Latin works written by churchmen of various stamps, works that intellectually energetic youths in cathedral and parish schools were required to read. These works included the writings of well-educated churchmen we’ve met before in our podcast – Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and in Isidore’s own age, Gregory the Great. Perhaps best typified by Augustine’s City of God, the energies of these Latin church fathers had been directed toward de-secularizing the natural sciences and philosophy of classical antiquity in order to bend them into conformity with Catholic ideology. Texts from classical antiquity, if they were on theologically neutral topics, like grammar, rhetoric, or etymology, might have been read in Isidore’s day with the same meticulous attention to detail as they had five centuries earlier. But if those same texts were philosophical, or literary, or scientific in nature, Isidore’s generation already had four centuries of Christian revisionist intellectual history to draw on that contorted the philosophy of Plato, and the nature writing of Pliny the Elder, just to use two examples, into conformity with Catholicism.

From even the basic features of some of Isidore’s works, it is evident that he was ultimately more influenced by Late Antique Christian texts than he was those of pagan antiquity. As an example, Isidore wrote two works of universal history, and a history of the Goths. These texts were not modeled on the style of Thucydides or Tacitus – in other words, they were not windows into specific junctures of geopolitics and international relations in which statesmen, military leaders and others determined the course of a finite juncture of history. Instead, Isidore’s works of history, like those of Gregory of Tours, Augustine, Jerome, and Eusebius, were universalizing texts, bringing contemporary history into a framework of Christian eternity. Isidore’s history of the Goths begins with creation, and then mythical origin stories before getting down into the nitty gritty of the more recent happenings in barbarian kingdoms. As a student, then, Isidore went to school in a period during which Christian intellectuals had been cannibalizing and repurposing the texts of pagan antiquity for a long time, molding them to fit into a Catholic worldview or simply ignoring them altogether. Isidore’s own works of history, first a universal chronicle and second a history of the Goths, are texts written to gratify the tastes of Catholic triumphalists and the glorify the Visigothic monarchy under which Isidore served. Information not germane to these central purposes was not selected for inclusion.

Now, I’ve offered you some extensive background on Isidore’s cultural roots and education, first because it’s intrinsically interesting, but also, because when Isidore became Bishop of Seville around 600 or so, he assumed the office during what must have been an exciting moment in the very early history of Catholic Spain. The Third Council of Toledo in 589 had ratified Catholicism as the religion of the Visigothic monarchs and their subordinates. The church was roaring to life on the Iberian Peninsula, fed by a loyal new monarchical dynasty and the tithes of a growing laity. If the Hispano-Roman populace, during the century between 489 and 589, had thought longingly back to the advantages of living in the Roman empire, by 589 and after, the old empire was decisively falling into the rear-view mirror of history. To Isidore’s generation of churchmen, it was time to organize, and to think big – to harvest what was useful from the classical past, and to reconceive it for the Christian future.

This future, as Isidore assumed the mantle of Bishop of Seville, must have seemed very bright indeed. By 600, his family had become distinguished. His brother Leander had died, hence Isidore’s elevation to bishop in Seville. But Isidore also had two other siblings of some acclaim. Another older brother, Fulgentius, ended up becoming the Bishop of Écija, just sixty miles east of Seville. And Isidore’s sister Florentina became a nun and thereafter an abbess in the same city. Isidore, then, came to the office of Bishop of Seville at about 40 years old, on the heels of multiple decades of growing unity and prosperity in Visigothic Spain. The next few decades of his life, between 600 and 636, as he went from his forties to his mid-seventies, would also be overall promising ones.

King Reccared’s death in 601, at the outset of Isidore’s bishopric, began a period of Visigothic history slightly rockier than the two prior decades. Isidore, in his early forties, would have seen Reccared’s son deposed by a nobleman named Witteric, who ruled from 603-610. Witteric’s rule, after the brief rule of his son, gave way to the ascendancy of King Sisebut. Between 612 and 621, the Visigothic King Sisebut, a close friend and colleague with Isidore of Seville, ruled over the Iberian Peninsula, extending Visigothic military authority there, and also the prerogatives of the Catholic Church, and making decisive strides against the Byzantine enclave down on the coast. It was Sisebut’s successor Suintila, or sometimes Swinthila, however, who finally booted the Byzantines out of the Iberian Peninsula. Suintila, who ruled from 621-631, during Isidore’s 60s, managed to eliminate the Byzantine enclave along the southern coast, making the entirety of modern-day Spain and Portugal, plus that strip along the southwestern French coast up to Montpellier, into Visigothic territory.

As he reached age 70, Isidore likely had no illusions about the probity and selflessness of secular monarchs. Isidore had seen coups and usurpations, and had likely bitten his tongue to serve Visigothic kings whom he didn’t necessarily revere. Isidore himself is also distinctly unappealing by one standard of basic human compassion – following much of patristic history, Isidore was doggedly antisemitic, both in his writings and the canon law that he backed at synods over his long bishopric. Antisemitic though he and his Catholic contemporaries in Visigothic Spain demonstrably were, within the framework of their Christian kingdom, they promoted order and stability, and were a buffer against the constant coups and succession disputes that rocked their kingdom. At the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, over which Isidore presided in his early 70s, he was still laying down canon law with his contemporaries. He died in 636 at the age of about 76, having served as bishop of one of the main cultural engines of Visigothic Spain for three and a half decades.

Isidore of Seville and the Encyclopedia

Now that we know a bit about Isidore’s life and times, let’s move on to the main course of this episode, and talk about Isidore’s works. There are quite a few of them. After Isidore died in 636, his friend and colleague, a bishop named Braulio, composed a list of all of the great many books Isidore had left behind. There are 24 books in this list. They culminated, toward the end of Isidore’s career, with the Etymologies – we have a letter from 632 or 633 in which Isidore’s friend Braulio implores him to send “the books of the Etymologies. . .I am seeking from you. . .send these to me copied out and in their entirety.”⁷ Braulio knew, as is evident today, that the encyclopedic book would go on to be Isidore’s most famous and well circulated, and the capstone of Isidore’s long career as a scholar, and also, his unique disposition as a thinker.

Scattered across Isidore’s corpus of works, there is, to put it simply, an instinct to catalog, organize, and distill. While Isidore’s 24 books can loosely be grouped into works of history, works of theology, works on linguistics, works on science, and texts combining these fields, their most unifying characteristic is a desire to compress a lot of disparate and unruly information into indexed entries. Five of his books did just this – a handbook with short summaries of all of the Bible’s books, for instance, and a similar index of church father’s lives and works; an inventory of confusing synonyms and homophones, and an anthology summarizing the contents of ancient treatises. His most famous book, the Etymologies, epitomizes this careerlong desire to catalog things into listings, and by the time he wrote it, he had been grouping, arranging, and systematizing whole fields of study into user-friendly guides for a long time.

Not all of Isidore’s books were indexed guides like this, though. He composed works within established genres of Late Antique Catholic theology – two antisemitic tracts urging the conversion of Jews, a text against contemporary heresies, one that dabbled in Biblical numerology, one about the roots of ecclesiastical offices and liturgy, and one about monastic rule. He wrote a treatise on the natural sciences which we’ll discuss a bit later, and the aforementioned two books of history, as well as third book about the lives of distinguished men. Some of Isidore’s texts were modest in scope and duration, and many, while they were certainly impressive undertakings, didn’t exactly use broad based sources. However, all told, due to a strong early education, a consistently studious adulthood, a circle of likeminded scholarly acquaintances, and a lifelong instinct to sort, to clarify, and to condense, by the time he was in his 50s and 60s, Isidore was in a position to compile a respectable amount of the knowledge of Latin Late Antiquity, including the books he himself had already written, into one place. That place ended up being the Etymologies.

So, let’s put the Etymologies on our desk, now, and spend some time with it – this book was, according to the standard Cambridge University Press edition, “arguably the most influential book, after the Bible, in the learned world of the Latin West for nearly a thousand years,” and so it’s worth knowing about.⁸ Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies is often, rightly, called an encyclopedia. But its name comes from the author’s abiding interest in the origins of words, an interest that spans the Etymologies from cover to cover. On the subject of etymology, Isidore writes that “The knowledge of a word’s etymology often has an indispensable usefulness for interpreting the word, for when you have seen whence a word has originated, you understand its force more quickly. Indeed, one’s insight into anything is clearer when its etymology is known.”⁹ One of the curiosities of Isidore’s famous book is that in it, he often chases, sometimes very adventurously, after etymologies, generating ones that are innovative, but inaccurate. While the sometimes reckless pursuit of etymological roots is one of the encyclopedia’s most notorious features, another might be termed its derivativeness. In other words, a lot of what Isidore wrote in the Etymologies was not original, but instead borrowed from other sources. As the aforementioned standard Cambridge edition puts it, “To assess Isidore’s achievement [in the Etymologies] we cannot look to original researches or innovative interpretations, but rather to the ambition of the whole design, to his powers of selection and organization, and to his grand retentiveness. His aims were not novelty but authority, not originality but accessibility, not augmenting but preserving and transmitting knowledge.”¹⁰ Isidore, then, didn’t think of the Etymologies as his own authoritative take on thousands of subfields of knowledge. He used secondary sources as his own, wrote summaries of summaries, and naturally, followed the general tastes of the Catholic intelligentsia of his day. Nonetheless, the Etymologies, as it has come down to us in such a great many manuscripts, and secondary and tertiary quotations, remains a formidable book.

Isidore did not invent the encyclopedia – the genre went back to the days of the Roman Republic. Cato the Elder had written one back in the 180s BCE. More pertinent to Isidore, though, was the republican polymath Marcus Terentius Varro, a contemporary of Cicero and Julius Caesar, who wrote a nine-volume encyclopedia covering the main subjects of Roman knowledge up to that point.¹¹ A century later, the naturalist Pliny the Elder created his own encyclopedia. While Varro’s encyclopedia had mostly focused on what we might call academic subjects – liberal arts with a dash of geometry and arithmetic, Pliny the Elder’s most famous work, the Natural History, finished around 77 CE, was a scientific treatise through and through, dealing with zoology, anatomy, minerology, botany, astronomy and geology. The only comparably famous Roman encyclopedia was more specialized in scope – this was Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, and it was completed around the end of the first century and focused on rhetoric and literature.

There were other encyclopedias in later centuries – glossaries on various subjects done by pagan specialists and later, Christians authors like Cassiodorus, Lactantius, and Ambrose. Boethius, whom we met a few episodes ago, had written works in an encyclopedic style on the liberal arts and on formal logic, and perhaps if Boethius had lived long enough, Isidore’s predecessor would have undertaken an encyclopedia as ambitious as the one Isidore eventually did. We don’t have time here, for a full history of encyclopedia writing in classical and Late Antiquity, though it’s certainly an interesting subject. But considering that we have the most famous encyclopedia of the ancient world on our desks, we can make a couple of very simple observations about encyclopedia writing up to the time that Isidore undertook his own in roughly the 620s CE. The first is that Isidore had many models to draw on. The second, returning to an earlier point, is that these models prized comprehensiveness over originality, out of necessity taking things secondhand from other compilers in order to create the breadth of content endemic to the genre. There is a third point, as well, to consider.

Encyclopedias written by single authors are intrinsically hubristic endeavors, and, at their completion, if they’re completed at all, they tend to be baggy and unpolished. Isidore’s Etymologies was ultimately unfinished by the author himself – a late letter from Isidore to his friend Braulio tells its recipient that the Etymologies “has not been emended due to my health” (413), but that Isidore hopes Braulio will help with the editing process, which Braulio later did. Late in his life, Isidore had no illusions that he had created an actual summary of all the knowledge in the world – the idea probably seemed as preposterous to him as it does to us. Toward the end of Book 12, a book that drew heavily on Pliny’s Natural History, Isidore is in the midst of describing the many varieties of the world’s birds, but at the end of the entry, he writes, “no one could penetrate the wildernesses of all India and Ethiopia and Scythia, so as to know the kinds of birds and their differing characteristics” (XII.vii.2). Isidore, then, was well aware that as vast as his compendium was, it was still a largely derivative work, and an unfinished and uncomprehensive one at that. Though the book never did receive the careful sheen of a final edit from its author, the Etymologies is still a sprawling text, its twenty sections spanning everything from law to angels; from Asian geography to rhetoric; from atoms to heretics; from clothing and furniture to heaven and saints. [music]

The Etymologies: Some Sample Entries

Now that we have an idea of the background and overall shape of the Etymologies, let’s get a little better sense of what a typical entry looks like. The first entry we’ll look at is about halfway through the encyclopedia, and it’s the first entry in a section titled De homine et portentis, or “The Human Being and Portents.” And before I quote it, a special word about the edition I’m using for this episode. This is a Cambridge edition, first published in 2006, entitled The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, translated and given an introduction and notes by scholars Stephen Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof. I wanted to say all of their names at least once in this episode, because the annotated translation they produced was an absolutely massive endeavor to undertake, and in the spirit of Isidore himself, they took quite a sizable and convoluted body of work and made it approachable to non-specialists. So, academic shout-outs aside, let’s take a look at that sample entry in the Etymologies, again on the subject of human beings and portents. In this entry, Isidore is going to trace out the etymological roots of some words very basic to any discussion of humanity. Here’s an excerpt from this section in that 2006 Cambridge translation, a fairly long quote:

1. Nature (natura) is so called because it causes something to be born (nasci, ppl. natus), for it has the power of engendering and creating. Some people say that this is God, by whom all things have been created and exist. 2. Birth (genus) is named from generating (gignere, ppl. genitus), and the term is derived from “earth,’ from which all things are born, for in Greek ‘earth’ is called γη. . .4. Human beings (homo) are so named because they were made from the soil (humus), just as is [also] said in Genesis. . .7. Soul (anima) takes its name from the pagans, on assumption that it is wind – hence wind is called άνεμος in Greek, because we seem to stay alive by drawing air into the mouth. But this is quite clearly untrue, since the soul is generated much earlier than air can be taken into the mouth. (XI.i.1-2,4,7)

The entry goes on to discuss the roots of the Latin words for spirit, mind, body, senses, hair, eyes, cheeks, upper and lower lip, armpits, each finger, bones, genitals, spleen, lungs, and so on, with sub-entries frequently offering both an etymological explanation of a word, as well as a brief description of the item under discussion. The entire encyclopedia works in just this way, as we saw Isidore noting that the Latin word for man (homo) originates in the word for soil (humus). As a careful student of the Bible, Isidore draws connections to scripture when he can, as he does in that above quote related to homo and humus when he notes that the Book of Genesis describes God creating Adam from the dust of the ground. And also as a careful student of the Bible, Isidore sometimes picks apart pagan etymological constructions. The Latin word for soul, Isidore writes, is anima, but this comes from the mistaken assumption that a soul is engendered when a baby first draws its breath, whereas for him, as a student of Late Antique Christian theology, souls existed prior to being embodied in the first place.

While we’re on the subject of breathing, let’s take a look at another encyclopedia entry – this one on lungs. It’s not a showstopper or even an important entry, but this next excerpt from the Etymologies will once again show you what Isidore is doing, and not doing in his famous encyclopedia. Here is Isidore’s entry on lungs, in that 2006 Cambridge translation:

124. “Lung” (pulmo) is a word derived from Greek, for the Greeks call the lung πλεύμων,because it is a fan (flabellum) for the heart, in which the πνεύμα, that is, the breath, resides, through which the lungs are both put in motion and kept in motion – from this also the lungs are so named. Now, in Greek πνεύμα means “breathing,” which, by blowing and exhaling, sends the air out and draws it back. The lungs are moved through this, and they pump, both in opening themselves, so that they may catch a breath, and in constricting, so that they may expel it. The lungs are the pipe-organ of the body. (XI.1.124)

And that is an entire encyclopedia entry, representative of Isidore’s work throughout the Etymologies. In a long section on anatomy (Book 11, Chapter 1, by the way), entry number 124 out of the 146 subsections is devoted to lungs. And in this subsection devoted to lungs, Isidore focuses immediately on etymology – the Latin pulmo comes from the Greek πλεύμων. This etymological analysis gives way to a short, and connected description of the function of the lungs – they expand and compress in order to provide the function of respiration to the body. Needless to say, there’s no anatomical detail from a modern perspective – no sense of where lungs connect with the trachea, or mention of bronchi, bronchioles or alveoli – this was the 610s and 620s CE, after all. Isidore’s guiding agenda is to present familiar Latin words, offer etymologies for them, and then provide basic explanations of why such words and etymological roots are associated with things out there in the world.

There are hundreds of entries like this in Isidore’s encyclopedia. Thunder, he writes in a section called De tonitruo, takes its name for the loud sound we associated with it, for tonitrus, or thunder, comes from the word for tone, or tonus (XIII.viii). Similarly, lightning, or fulgur in Latin comes from the word for “flash” – fulgere – and the word for “striking” – ferire. Isidore’s etymological analysis here is unimpeachable, and his scientific analysis of thunder and lightning, for the seventh century, is pretty darned good. He writes of lightning that “Colliding clouds cause lightning, for the collision of any things creates fire, as we notice with stones, and the rubbing of wheels, and in forests of the trees; in a similar way fire occurs in clouds. . .[And lightning] is seen first [before thunder] because its light is bright, and the thunder comes to one’s ears later” (XIII.ix.1, XIII.vii.2). Understandably, Isidore doesn’t describe lightning as a result of negatively charged electrons at the bases of clouds being drawn to positively charged protons down on the ground, nor the fact that we see lightning before we hear thunder to be a result of light being an electromagnetic wave and sound being a mechanical wave at moves at a far slower rate. That said, alongside his many, many etymologies, he often advances scientific explanations that are respectable enough on their own terms.

Some of Isidore’s scientific explanations are apiece with the adventuresome suppositions of antiquity. He alleges the existence of an invisible snake called the salpuga (XII.iv.33). He describes the labyrinth of Knossos as the home of the monstrous minotaur (XV.ii.36), and seemed to believe that satyrs existed (XI.iii.21), because they had been described in one of Saint Jerome’s novellas about desert hermits. Isidore writes that hedgehog mommies roll around in fallen grapes and then, with grapes impaled on their spikes, they waddle back to their young, who can eat all the fruit (XII.iii.7). It’s an adorable image, but just not accurate – hedgehog babies, like other young mammals, nurse from their mothers. And at numerous junctures of Isidore’s encyclopedia, he is drawn to rather appealing, but false explanations for things, whether these explanations are scientific or etymological in nature. He reads the word salsus, which means “spiced” in Latin, as being compounded of the words sale asparsus, or “sprinkled with salt,” admitting that he does not quite know how sale asparsus became salsus (XX.ii.23). Isidore’s etymologies in the encyclopedia run the gamut between spot on and definitely false. While he is not at all above constructing creative etymologies like the one we just heard, in his own explanation of etymologies in the encyclopedia, Isidore is quick to admit that some words don’t have any etymology that can be traced. This is often, he emphasizes, because “not all words were established by the ancients from nature; some were established by whim, just as we sometimes give names to our slaves and possessions according to what tickles our fancy” (I.xxix.30). And while some words are generated by the random inclinations of various speakers, Isidore writes, others “take their names from the languages of various peoples, so that it is difficult to discern their origin” (I.xxix.5). These borrowings, he tells us a moment later, are called barbarolexis, not to be confused with barbarismus, or incorrect pronunciation, grammar or syntax.

To give you one more sample of a nearly complete entry, and moreover how the many sections of this long book can sound, I’m going to read you what Isidore wrote about underwear, something that we can all relate to, because we’re all wearing underwear right now – or are we? Anyway,

A loincloth (lumbare) is so named because it is fastened over the loins (lumbus) or because it clings to them. . .A nightshirt (camisia) is so named because we sleep in these in our cots (cama) that is, in our beds. Undergarments (femoralia) are so called because they clothe the thighs (femur). These are also known as “breeches” (bracae) because they are short (c.f. βραχύς, “short”). . .The tubrucus is so named because it covers the shins (tibia) and breeches (bracae). The tibracus, because it reaches from the arms (brachium) to the shins (tibia). (XIX.xxii.25,29-30)

There are a number of names, in that passage, for undergarments worn by Latin speakers during Late Antiquity. Absorbing the specifics, for our purposes, isn’t very important in order to understand Isidore’s book. What we can take away from that quote is instead the way that Isidore meanders through a number of proper nouns under his subject heading, offers etymological roots, and then moves on. He doesn’t, in other words, offer any serious catalog of undergarments – just a dozen sentences with as many etymologies – and then moves onto the next encyclopedia entry.

Some topics in Isidore’s encyclopedia, then, receive substantially more extensive treatment than others, and it’s safe to assume that he probably didn’t consider undergarments to be a very eminent topic for extended analysis. Isidore is generally judicious about what deserves extensive treatment and what is covered pretty quickly. Loincloths, as mesmerizing as they surely are to some, are given etymological roots quite briskly, whereas topics more pervasive in human civilization or nature, such as lead (XVI.xii), or the Aegean Islands (XIV.vi), or church councils (VI.xvi), or public buildings receive much more extensive coverage. As a result of Isidore’s careful strategy of detailing some topics far more than others, and also because of a seamless and discernibly narrative organization in the Etymologies, it is quite possible to read the various books of the encyclopedia from end to end. The narrative, as such, is admittedly pretty dry – going through sequences of hundreds of etymologies per book requires some mental stamina. But during the encyclopedia’s long tenure in the median library and bookroom of the Latin speaking world – this was surely one of the ways that it was enjoyed – read as a continuous narrative, in addition to serving as a reference book. [music]

Book 11 of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies

Now that we’ve learned about the scope of the Etymologies as a whole and read some of its subsections, it’s time to look at a longer continuous section together. We can pretend, for a moment, to be monks of the high Middle Ages, perhaps a little bored, at a moment during which our friends still haven’t finished up their chores. And we will pretend that we’ve gone into our abbey’s scriptorium on a nice, sunny day, and plucked off of the bookshelves the second longest volume in the room – not the Bible, but the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, which is even longer than the City of God, a book sitting just next to it. Isidore’s Etymologies would be an illuminated manuscript, and quite an expensive one, and we will thumb it open to about halfway through, and happen upon a section toward the very end of Book XI with the title of “Portents.” This section, as we leaf forward a couple of pages, has been illustrated with many striking pictures of strange creatures, and so naturally we have to take the book over to a table designated for reading, and see what it’s all about. And here is what we read:

Portenta esse, Varro ait quae contra naturam nata videntur: sed non sunt contra naturam, quia divina voluntate fiunt, cum voluntas Creatoris cuiusque conditae rei natura sit. [Or, in English.]

[Marcus Terentius] Varro defines portents as beings that seem to have been born contrary to nature – but they are not contrary to nature, because they are created by divine will. (XI.iii.1)

Beings contrary to nature. That sounds pretty interesting. So let’s move forward and read this section in its entirety. Here we go.

Isidsore writes that portents include not only signs and omens, but also strange beings born with certain kinds of mutations. Of course, he offers an etymology of the Latin word portentum – the term comes from the Latin words for “foreshadowing” (protendere) and “showing beforehand,” or praeostendere. These etymologies, however, give way to a long section of entries that are light on etymology and heavy on myths and legends. And for clarification, because this is a little bit confusing, we generally today understand portents as signs that signify things to come. Isidore, in Book 11 of the Etymologies, understands portents in this same way, but he also includes a long description of mythological creatures in his section on portents.

Describing portents in the more traditional sense initially, Isidore writes that sometimes, God desires to herald events to come by causing strange mutations and birth defects in newborn humans and animals. In the kingdom of Xerxes, Isidore recounts, a mare gave birth to a fox, which was a portent of the fall of the Achaemenid empire. Similarly, in Macedon, young Alexander the Great learned of a baby born dead that was human on top, and made from various animals on the bottom, and this stillborn creature heralded the coming assassination of Alexander’s father Philip. The Roman poet Lucan, says Isidore, wrote of an Italian woman giving birth to a snake, a birth which signified grim news during the civil wars that brought down the Roman republic.

Unnatural beings, or portents, writes Isidore, come in all shapes in sizes, from Homer’s gargantuan monster Tityos down to the pygmies written about by Greeks. Sometimes, creatures are born with two or three heads, and sometimes, people are born with the canines of dogs. Half human, half animal creatures, like the minotaur born on the island of Crete, exist as well, but portentous mutations more often appear on humans with unusual morphological traits – eyes situated in foreheads or chests, conjoined fingers, or people born with unusual sexual configurations.

A number of episodes ago, when reading about Lucian of Samosata, we learned that in the historical and geographical works of antiquity, it was common, when writing about very distant regions, allege that very unusual variants of human beings lived there. We learned about how antiquity’s historians and geographers, like Herodotus, Iambulus, and Ctesius, wrote wacky stuff about far off India, the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere – stuff that we now know was fiction. Isidore, writing within this old tradition of geographical mythmaking, references the existence of dog-headed people and cyclopes living in India, and reports the legend of people in Libya born without heads, and others born without necks, and far to the east, human beings born with no noses, or lower lips that are so dangly that they can be stretched up to shield faces from the sun. People live up in Scythia, Isidore writes, whose ears are so large they can cover up entire bodies, and others in Scythia have horse hooves instead of feet. A subgroup of the population of Ethiopia walks on all fours and never makes it past the age of 30, and another subgroup of Ethiopians have only one foot on which they speedily hop around, but this foot is so large they can lie on their backs and use it to shade themselves from the sun. Returning to India, Isidore says that 12-foot-tall giants live there, as well as pygmies just a cubit in height, as well as females who give birth at the age of five years old and do not make it past the age of eight.

Now, up to this point, in Isidore’s list of portents, humans and other creatures with strange morphology are often described matter-of-factly. Sometimes in the index of portents thus far, Isidore indicates that he is reporting secondhand allegations, telling us that “People believe that” (XI.iii.17) the headless humanoids of Libya exist, or “people write about” (XI.iii.18) human beings in the distant east having no noses. When Isidore leaves the realm of ancient history and geography (in other words, Herodotus and Ctesius), and moves onto the realm of literature (in other words, Homer and Ovid), he is quick to tell us that “Other fabulous human monstrosities are told of, which do not exist but are concocted to interpret the causes of things” (XI.iii.28). These literary creatures include a beast called Geryon, a Spanish king with three human bodies, and the Gorgons, whose snaky hair and hideous countenances turned their foes to stone. Then there were the Sirens, who seduced sailors into shipwrecks, and Scylla, the dog-headed monster that was said to haunt the Strait of Messina. Cerberus, writes Isidore, was the three-headed canine guardian of the underworld, its three heads signifying infancy, youth, and old age – the phases that consume a human life. The Hydra, according to Isidore, was no monster, but in reality, a highland that flooded a city with multiple channels of water, a place from which the hero Hercules was able to divert water.

Isidore also offers an explanation for the Chimera, which he describes as a “tri-form beast: the face of a lion, the rear of a dragon, and a she-goat in the middle” (VI.iii.36). The Chimera was actually not a monster, Isidore writes, but instead a mountain on which lions, goats and snakes lived in different regions – a dangerous place for settlers in the region of Asia Minor called Cilicia. According to Isidore hero Bellerophon didn’t slay any monster – he simply made this treacherous mountain country habitable, and that was the real story of the Chimera. After briefly mentioning centaurs and minotaurs, and not particularly coming down on whether these beasts are fact or fiction, Isidore arrives at the subject of transformations of creatures, or metamorphoses, the last entry in his long discussion of portents.

The transformations mentioned include those caused by the witch Circe on the crew of Odysseus, and an otherwise (to my knowledge) unattested story about Arcadians who could be changed into wolves by swimming across a special pond. Isidore tells us that striga, or witches, have been transformed from humans, and can transform themselves into all sorts of animals by means of special trinkets and potent herbs. Taking a play from Virgil’s Georgics, and before him the Biblical story of Samson’s riddle in the Book of Judges, Isidore ends his long catalog of portents by writing that when calf dies, it transforms into bees, just as dead horses transform into beetles, dead mules change into locusts, and dead crabs transform into scorpions. The statement, by the way, is based on antiquity’s fascination, on the poetic record, at least, with the way that bees sometimes nest in animal carcasses, and honey can be found in otherwise yucky corpses. As to Isidore’s claims that mules change into locusts and crabs into scorpions, I imagine these were the result of anecdotal observations having evolved into pseudoscientific commonplaces.

Anyway, let’s zoom out. I imagine that the listening experience I just offered you was not exactly electrifying. We did just read an entire section of Isidore’s Etymologies, though, a book that was perhaps more historically important than it is breathtaking to read today. In it, Isidore begins with a general definition of what portents are. He offers some general examples of strange births which presage important events. He then reviews examples of strange creatures from the record of ancient history and geography. And finally, he refers to some of Greek mythology’s more famous creatures, and includes a little coda at the end about transformation. One of the most important observations we can make about what we just read actually has to do with its structure, rather than its content. Isidore’s writings about portents form a mostly continuous narrative. And many sections of the Etymologies can be read in just this way. Book XIV is a long, organized exposition of the geography of the world as Isidore understood it in the early seventh century. The subsequent book, on the subject of types of buildings and public spaces, can also be read nearly as a continuous discourse. Book XVII, on agriculture and botany, is similarly organized, such that it can be read from end to end. This is part of what makes the Etymologies only sort of an encyclopedia by modern standards. While some portions of the book work less well as extended narratives, much of it can be studied sequentially, section after section, as a textbook for the uninitiated.

Let’s return, though, to the subject of content, rather than structure. Isidore’s catalog of portents, a bestiary of often monstrous creatures, isn’t exactly the first thing you’d expect to read from the pen of a devout Catholic bishop. As we learned earlier, he does make a careful distinction between the mythological beings of poetry, and the creatures purported to dwell in various distant areas of the world by ancient historians and geographers, being skeptical about the former, but less so of the latter. Occasionally in his list of portents, Isidore’s Christianity makes him more critical of certain legendary creatures. After explaining that the Latin word gigantes comes from the Greek word γηγενής, or “earthborn,” he turns to the subject of the story of the Nephilim in the Book of Genesis. Isidore writes that “some, inexperienced with Holy Scripture. . .falsely suppose that apostate angels lay with the daughters of humans before the Flood, and that from this the Giants were born – that is, excessively large and powerful men” (XI.iii.14). This, Isidore implies, is an incorrect correlation, although he doesn’t elaborate on why. A secondary moment in Isidore’s catalog of portents is also, probably, influenced by his perspective as a Late Antique Christian. This is Isidore’s take on the sirens of Greek mythology.

The sirens, as you know, are, in Homer’s Odyssey and afterward, understood as hybrids of women and birds whose enchanting songs lure seafarers to shipwrecks and death. In almost any museum that one visits featuring Classical or Hellenistic Greek art, you can see sirens depicted in just this way somewhere in the exhibit – in statues, or in black- or red-figure pottery. This was not, however, how Isidore conceived of sirens. Isidore writes,

People imagine. . .Sirens who were part maidens, part birds, having wings and talons; one of them would make music with her voice, the second with a flute, and the third with a lyre. They would draw sailors, enticed by the song, into shipwrecks. In truth, however, they were harlots, who, because they would seduce passers-by into destitution, were imagined as bringing shipwreck upon them. They were said to have wings and talons because sexual desire both flies and wounds. (XI.iii.30)

It is a discernibly different take on the sirens of Greek mythology than the traditional Homeric one. And we can guess that it was probably influenced by the climate of Late Antique Catholic theology. Churchmen like Isidore, after all, had been devouring erotic apocryphal acts literature and hagiography in which apostles and saints were tempted by seductresses for five hundred years. After the fourth century and clerical celibacy movement, they rarely had anything good to say about sex and romance, and so Isidore’s take on the sirens here in the Etymologies is likely influenced by this long evolution in Christian ideology.

Still, inasmuch as Isidore can push back against the notion that Hesiod’s titans are the same as the Bible’s Nephilim, and disparage Homer’s sirens as roadside strumpets, there is an awful lot in Isidore’s writings on portents and mythological creatures that sounds pretty provocative for a Catholic theologian. From the Christian God communicating via sometimes grotesque mutations at birth, to uncritical reportage of titans, giants, witchcraft, and people with canine heads, Isidore’s list of portents, in some ways, sounds like a catalog of heretical superstitions. On the other hand, though, it sounds precisely like what we might expect from a learned Late Antique bishop – a washing together of Christianity and paganism such as had already been going on for centuries. Ancient pagan speculations about portents, and monsters, and witchcraft, needless to say, were never extinguished by Christianity. Late Antique Catholics, like the ancient pagans before them, like the monks in abbey libraries centuries later, and like us today, have gathered around stories about legendary creatures and ill omens for a long time, because something in these stories speaks to us as human beings of any generation.

So, we’ve learned a fair amount about the Etymologies up to this point – the way it pervasively focuses on the roots of words, the way it’s organized as both continuously readable and a series of tabulated entries, and finally, the way that, although it’s a text written by a Catholic churchman, it still contains oodles of information on ancient pagan history and culture. Before we take a look at some of Isidore’s other works and consider his reception as a whole, there’s one more issue related to the Etymologies that perhaps one half of one percent of you listening are patiently waiting to hear discussed. This issue is the important contributions that Isidore made in standardizing punctuation – most famously the period, but also the comma and colon. [music]

Isidore of Seville, the Period, and Scriptio Continua

There is a story in the pages of the second-century Roman writer Aulus Gellius, a story put into circulation very roughly around 180 CE. This story concerns reading from the printed page. In it, the book’s author, Aulus Gellius, reports going to a bookstore. In this bookstore, he meets a rather puffed up and pretentious man, who claims that he, and only he, can interpret the work of a bygone satirist. Aulus Gellius is privately skeptical about the pedant’s claims. The pedant recites a couple of passages from the satirist from memory, emphasizing they are so profound that only he can interpret them. Unluckily for the pedant, Aulus Gellius actually has a book of the works of the ancient satirist under discussion. The second-century Roman writer Aulus Gellius gets this book out, thumbs through to some satires, and asks the pedant if the pedant might do him the favor of reading them aloud, and then providing them the generosity of his learned interpretation.

At this, the pedant hesitates. Perhaps Aulus Gellius should read him the passage in question, and then he can interpret it? Why, Aulus Gellius says, putting the pedant squarely on the spot, that’s quite silly. Only the pedant understands the satires, and thus he should read them. The pedant is thus compelled to perform a public reading. And Aulus Gellius describes how this reading unfolds:

I handed him an ancient copy of the satire, of tested correctness and clearly written. But he took it with a most disturbed and worried expression. But what shall I say followed? I really do not dare to ask you to believe me. Ignorant schoolboys, if they had taken up that book, could not have read more laughably, so wretchedly did he pronounce the words and murder the thought. Then, since many were beginning to laugh, he returned the book to me.¹²

The pedant, a moment later, tries to claim that his eyes are tired out from working at night, but Aulus Gellius and the others present are unconvinced. The pedant’s pretensions of vast knowledge are false, and he can barely even read from a printed page at all.

By the year 180 or so, when Aulus Gellius set down this story, staged recitations had been a part of Roman culture for a long time, and bilingual literacy was par for the course in certain social echelons. In some ways, the story of the confrontation at the bookseller’s shop is just a tale about exposing a charlatan. But it’s also, indirectly, a story about the difficulty of actually reading from a manuscript in the second century CE.

Greek and Latin manuscripts, for ages, had been written as blocks of words, with no spaces, nor differentiation between capital and lowercase – this was called scriptio continua. Anyone who sought to read aloud from a scroll or codex with this sort of lettering, like the wannabe philosopher in Aulus’ Gellius bookshop, would be hard pressed to do a decent job of it without actually familiarizing themselves with the text ahead of time. A lack of spacing, punctuation, and capitalization not only created difficulties in recitation. Scriptio continua also, more simply, created unintended ambiguities on manuscript pages and made reading less of a user-friendly activity than it is today. When your brain constantly has to work to parse out giant, gummed-together blocks of letters into words and syntactical units, you’re using a lot of processing power to simply move your eyes back and forth along individual lines and understand language at a literal level, as modern laboratory experiments have shown.¹³ Nonetheless, in Greco-Roman cultures of patronage, where public recitation was what paid the bills, written manuscripts remained stubbornly secondary to oral performance for a long time, and the inertia of tradition kept them in scriptio continua format deep into Late Antiquity.

Now, let’s talk about this is all related to Isidore of Seville. If there is a tagline, and a specious one about Isidore of Seville, that tagline is that he invented the period – putting periods at the ends of sentences, in other words. Modern scholarship on punctuation sees its evolution to be more manifold and gradual across antiquity. The Hellenistic Greek scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, some 800 years prior to Isidore, had promoted a basic form of punctuation to help readers identify short pauses, and breaks between independent clauses, and then breaks between sentences – this system was called théseis in Greek, and distinctiones in Latin. The system was used sporadically throughout antiquity, having very gradually caught on in Latin by the fourth century CE. The grammarian Aelius Donatus, in the mid-300s, included a guide on how to insert pauses into and between sentences in line with the old system of Aristophanes of Byzantium five hundred years before, and after Donatus, discussions of how to punctuate sentence pauses became a standard part of the majority of works on Latin grammar.¹⁴ Sentence level punctation, during the Christian theological polemics of the fourth century and after, also became an important part of communicating orthodox interpretations of Biblical texts.

Two centuries before Isidore became the Bishop of Seville, Augustine became the Bishop of Hippo, and Augustine was thinking very carefully about punctuation. In On the Christian Doctrine, Augustine first writes that there are indeed ambiguities in scripture, and these ambiguities are sometimes not helped by Latin bibles set down in thick bricks of scriptio continua. In certain severe cases, Augustine writes, not knowing where to pause can create heretical readings. Augustine’s example – an easy one to remember, involves the famous first two verses of the Book of John. These verses, according to today’s punctuation conventions, are “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [Period] He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). Familiar stuff, and all harmonious with the Nicene Christian doctrine of a co-eternal father and son. It was possible, however, Augustine knew, to read the Latin as follows: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and God was. [Period] This was in the beginning with God.”¹⁵ With that period moved by just two words, there is no indication that God and the Word were the same thing, which removes the heft of one of the most important sentences in the whole Bible in support of Nicene Christianity. One tiny, misplaced dot, and, in Augustine’s mind, at least, and the scriptio continua version of the Gospel of John contained a heresy.

I have offered you this extremely abridged version of the history of punctuation in antiquity for one main reason. When Isidore of Seville got busy on his corpus of works in the early 600s, the notion of punctuating sentences had been around for a long time. By the 300s, it had become a standard topic of interest for Latin grammarians, and at the end of the 300s, as we know from Augustine, Christian theologians, extremely keen on specific interpretations of scripture, had become conscientious of the tiny marks that might be employed to demarcate the beginnings and ends of sentences and clauses. And into this long discussion, around 600 CE, Isidore offered his own contributions – contributions inspired by the punctilious mind of a lifelong scholar, and also, with a heresiologist’s attention to scriptural detail.

Book I of the Etymologies offers the reader a tour-de-force overview of grammar, including the Latin alphabet, parts of speech, metrical feet, meters, orthography, solecisms, literary genres, and various advanced literary terms that we still learn today – allegory, metaphor, irony, anaphora, alliteration, metonymy, antonomasia, polysyndeton, and others, all with explanations and representative examples. Within the grammatical book of Etymologies, sections 18-21 delve down into the nitty gritty of accent marks, punctuation, and what we might call marginal signs and what Isidore calls “Critical Signs” (I.xxi.1). The accent marks under discussion include ones still current today – the acute accent (ˊ), the grave (ˋ), the circumflex (ˆ), caron (ˇ), the macron (ˉ), the breve (˘), the apostrophe (’), and others. The use of these diacritics has changed since the seventh century, but nonetheless Isidore meticulously set down how they worked in Latin during his lifetime. Most famously, though, in Book I, Section 20, Isidore lays out an explanation of what he calls “Punctuated clauses” (I.20.1), often called distinctiones in Latin, and sometimes called positurae, which is Isidore’s term.

I’m going to read you what Isidore wrote about punctuating sentences and clauses, because it was quite an important part of his encyclopedia. The terminology is a little bit confusing, but if you listen carefully, you’ll get it – this is one of the most influential things ever written about grammar, so here goes. Isidore writes, in the Cambridge edition,

2. The first punctuated clause is called the subdivision, and it is the same as a comma. The middle punctuation follows: it is the colon. The final punctuation, which closes the entire sentence, is the period. . .The colon and the comma are parts of the sentence, as we have said. The difference between them is indicated by points placed in different spots. 3. For where the speech has begun and the sense is not yet complete, but it is necessary to take a breath, a comma occurs, that is, a part of the sense, and a point is placed even with the bottom of the letter. This is called the “subdivision” (subdistinctio) because it takes the point below (subtus), that is, at the bottom of the line. 4. And where, in the following words, the sentence now makes sense but something still remains for the completion of the sentence, a colon occurs, and we mark it by a point even with the middle of the letter. And we call this the “middle” (medius) punctuation, because we place the point at the middle of the letter. 5. But when, by proceeding through the speech, we make a complete closure of the sentence, a period occurs, and we place a point even with the top of the letter. This is called. . .a disjunction, because it sets apart a whole sentence. (I.xx.2-5)

So there you have it. A dot at the bottom of a line, which we’d call a period in modern typography, functions in Isidore’s mind as a comma, where the cadence of a sentence would naturally pause and a speaker would breathe. A dot in the middle of the line – like a bullet point, indicates the end of an independent clause. And a dot at the top of the line indicates the end of a sentence. And to reiterate, Isidore didn’t just make all of this up. It was quite an old system of parsing sentence syntax. But the explanation that you just heard – its placement in an overall well organized book on Latin grammar, which itself was imbedded in a vast encyclopedia – Isidore’s explanation of sentence punctuation was widely circulated enough that it was extremely influential in moving manuscript culture away from the old and problematic format of scriptio continua.

There’s more to this story. Modern historians of Late Antique and Medieval punctuation, like M.B. Parkes’ Pause and Effect and Paul Saenger’s Space Between Words go into a lot more detail, explaining how clerical scribes, beginning with Jerome, had offered each independent clause or other discrete syntactical unit its own indented line in a manuscript to help readers avoid the kinds of misreadings Augustine had fretted about.¹⁶ Later, Irish and Anglo-Saxon Bibles, to add greater syntactical clarity still, began including spaces between words, a practice that gradually took off in the eighth century, and had spread across the world of Latin Christendom by the 1200s and 1300s.¹⁷ To stick with our story for today, though, Isidore of Seville was an important milestone in the evolution of the way that we read and write today. Although little readerly emendations on scriptio continua manuscripts were probably always a part of antiquity’s manuscript culture, the clear, organized way that Isidore introduced the subject of punctuation in the Etymologies, and the eventual popularity of his most famous book, helped make communicating meaning through writing easier, forever after. [music]

Isidore of Seville’s On the Nature of Things

As we come to the tail end of this episode, I want to talk for just a bit about another book that Isidore wrote. This was his scientific treatise On the Nature of Things, which had the same title as Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, and borrows a bit of its content.¹⁸ When the Epicurean Lucretius, in the 60s or 50s BCE, wrote his book, Lucretius passed on a distinctly materialist view of the universe – Epicureans famously denied the existence of the afterlife, being one of the few ideological schools of antiquity that did not offer transcendence or posthumous pleasures to their adherents. Isidore’s On the Nature of Things, written almost seven hundred years after the pagan Lucretius’ work of the same title, is a work far less materialist in its outlook, being quick to read divine handiwork, and often Christian symbology into the natural phenomena of the universe.

Isidore’s scientificity – the extent to which we might call him scientific, by modern standards – is a rich and interesting subject. If we take a traditional view of the Middle Ages as a grim decline into superstition, then there is much in Isidore’s scientific work to pinpoint and disparage. More than a hundred years ago, Isidore’s biographer Ernest Brehaut wrote witheringly that “From the modern point of view the real benefit he conferred upon succeeding centuries was that in his encyclopaedic writings he presented to the intelligent the fact that there had been and might be such a thing as secular science.”¹⁹ There is some truth to this. Isidore’s On the Nature of Things, likely written between 611 and 612, did not exactly have the impact on modern science that the works of Copernicus and Newton would a thousand years later.²⁰ However, if we’re interested in Late Antiquity’s marbling of classical and Christian traditions, Isidore’s On the Nature of Things is quite a worthwhile book to dip into for a moment.

What prompted the scientific treatise was three things. A new Visigothic King had come to the throne. His name was Sisebut, and he and Isidore were evidently close friends. Sisebut wanted a work of Latin science to read, and Isidore, not having anything that contained the ideal swirl of classical science and Catholic doctrine on his bookshelves, decided to write one – a book that centered on an explanation of the division of time into units, an account of the universe’s beginning, and offered explanations of some of the major meterological and climatological phenomena that we encounter on Earth all the time. That was the first reason Isidore wrote On the Nature of Things. The second was that between 611 and 612, there were multiple lunar eclipses and a partial solar eclipse. During Late Antiquity, as before, it was not uncommon to interpret unusual astrological activity, along with atypical patterns in weather, as signs of divine favor or disfavor, or even of the coming of Judgment Day. Isidore was quite capable of reading divine messages into unusual occurrences – earlier we heard him citing the birth of mutated offspring as evidence of God communicating with mortals. However, when it came to eclipses, Isidore seems to have known that lunar and solar eclipses were, and had been scientifically predictable for a long time, and so the second reason for writing On the Nature of Things was to muffle the superstitious chatter by clergy and laity alike as a result of the eclipses of 611 and 612.

There was a third reason why Isidore wrote On the Nature of Things, and this had to do with the Late Antique Catholic clergy and how they viewed the galaxy. Since the Hellenistic period, Greco-Roman science had viewed the universe as spherical. Aristarchus of Samos, during the 200s BCE, had developed the idea of a heliocentric universe, and during the same century, the polymath Eratosthenes was able to calculate the circumference of the earth, along with its axial tilt. As scholars Calvin Kendall and Faith Wallis put it, “[centuries before,] [t]he overwhelming majority of Church Fathers were happy to accept the classical view of the material universe (with a few adjustments) as both correct and compatible with religious doctrine.”²¹ However, during the sixth century, a countercultural movement was occurring in Christianity to push back from the advanced science of the Hellenistic period, however imperfectly it had been received by Isidore’s day, and to instead propose a Biblically anchored view of the world as flat and floating over watery depths with the sun orbiting it. Isidore didn’t buy this scientific revisionism, and the third reason Isidore undertook On the Nature of Things – to push back against Biblical literalism and keep alive the more scientifically modern Greco-Roman view of the universe that had proved interoperable with Catholicism for a long time.

At first glance, these sound like motivations that might have produced quite an advanced scientific treatise. Isidore was no stranger to the works of Pliny, and Isidore’s book made use of other works of Roman science – those of several prominent Roman astronomers. But this is only a third of the pie chart that makes up Isidore’s sources for On the Nature of Things. The second third is actually classical poets – chiefly Virgil and Lucan, who, although they certainly wrote excellent stories, were odd sources to cite in a scientific treatise. And the final third of Isidore’s sources for his scientific book were texts authored by Christian predecessors who’d been interested in the natural sciences – most importantly a book called the Hexaemeron by Ambrose of Milan, but also pseudoscientific works by Augustine, Jerome, and other prominent churchmen from prior centuries.

We have read Lucretius’ earlier On the Nature of Things in our show, and we’ve certainly read lots of classical poetry, so the first two thirds of Isidore’s source material are familiar. The third, however – I mean works of science authored by the clergy – deserve a brief consideration here. Works by Ambrose and Augustine that concerned the natural world were likely to do something very strange by our standards, and that was essentially to perform exegetical work on nature – in other words, to read things like day and night, or rain and sun, or the seasons, as embodying some essentially Christian truism. Augustine, in a book called Questions on the Gospels, had written that, “[D]ay begins with the light and ends with the darkness, to represent the fall of man. . .Now the day goes from darkness to light. . .because the man delivered from the darkness of sin has come to the light of righteousness.”²² This is a strange thing to encounter, by the way, if you’re new to it – Late Antique Christians essentially performing interpretive work on the physical world – that the clouds symbolize this, and the ocean waves emblematize that, and spring flowers can be interpreted as this, and wolves having sex symbolize that. I actually think they skipped the wolf sex. Anyway, exegetical work on nature is one of the weirder features of Late Antique science written by Christians, but, the Middle Ages were nothing if not weird, and Augustine was certainly one of the architects of this weirdness.

To turn back to Isidore, let’s look at a few passages in which, again around 611 or 612, he took it upon himself to interpret nature as a Catholic. In a discussion of rain, Isidore first explains that water evaporates from the sea, and overhead, in the heat of the sun, water loses the saltiness of the ocean and becomes fresh.²³ After this, freshwater in gaseous form turns into heavy clouds, and, whether under the press of sunshine or buffeting of winds, raindrops fall from clouds. Just as often, vapor rises from the land into clouds, which, after a similar process, gets dislodged in the form of rain. So far, while Isidore doesn’t have modern technical terminology related to dew point and condensation, this sounds like very decent classical science on rainfall. A moment later, though, Isidore’s text changes its scope. Isidore writes, “Clouds. . .signify the apostles and teachers. The rains from the clouds, therefore, are the eloquent words of the apostles, which come as it were drop by drop, in the form of definitive statements, but which infuse the fruitfulness of religious instruction very abundantly.”²⁴ And that interpretation of rain ends the chapter on the subject. Now needless to say, the metaphor of edifying words as rain on parched ground was all over Christian and pagan antiquity – it’s quite a nice metaphor. But ancient works of secular science, while they entertained their various superstitions, did not so systematically understand the world in congruity with a single religious system.

Elsewhere, in nearby chapters, Isidore writes that hail symbolizes the adamancy of faithlessness, and that snow can be understood as the listless chilliness of unbelievers, who are fated to sink downward and downward (35.2). Winds, Isidore writes, symbolize the passings of angels; and other winds, the temptations of evil spirits (36.3). Thunder emblematizes the throaty reproach of God’s voice, or perhaps, the powerful preaching of saints (29.2). And just as the stars are faint next to the light of the sun, the piety of saints is miniscule alongside the majesty of Christ (24.2). I’m sure you get the idea of these parallels – take something in nature, then take a common Christian trope, and connect them. Isidore’s book On the Nature of Things contains more than this – in fact these figurative Christian parallels, when they occur, are usually at the end of more naturalistic explanations for the world around us. But inasmuch as they can seem trite, Isidore’s allegorical readings of nature are nonetheless steeped in the centuries-long traditions of Late Antique Catholic science and pseudoscience, with passages lifted, all over the place, from Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, and others.

While Christianity often has the last word in Isidore’s On the Nature of Things, the work is overall made up of a spongy mass of Christianity, and pagan poetry and science. Immediately before the quote we heard about clouds signifying preachers is a quote from Virgil (32.1).²⁵ An explanation of the names of seas and rivers involves a smorgasbord of pagan sources – the Roman tragedian Marcus Pacuvius and epic poet Gnaeus Naevius, an unknown Roman play and then the inevitable Virgil. On the whole, reading Isidore’s main scientific text today, we are struck by its miscellaneousness and its relative brevity – the hodgepodge nature of its sources and at the same time the brazen manner in which it follows its predecessors in telling us that rain, thunder, day, night, and the rest all fit into jigsaw puzzle of Christian ideology.

So let’s zoom out from Isidore’s On the Nature of Things and consider what all of this means. Scholars Calvin Kendall and Faith Wallis published a fantastically annotated edition of this book back in 2016, and in it, they explain the book in its cultural context very nicely. Here’s what they say:

[T]here is no evading the fact that On the Nature of Things seems to present an impoverished picture of the ancient scientific heritage. Its weaknesses betray the cultural rupture and decline of the age. The natural philosophy and scientific learning available even to one of Isidore’s social standing and resources seem to be attenuated, insecure, and derivative, especially when compared to the knowledge base of Latin Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries like Ambrose and Augustine. Indeed, Isidore often ‘reverse engineers’ ancient scientific learning by mining it out of the works of Church Fathers who benefited from richer and more vital classical educations.²⁶

A number of episodes ago, we considered the first half of Augustine’s City of God Against the Pagans, done between 413 and 420 CE. This earlier treatise took a sledgehammer to pagan ideology, finding little redeeming there other than Platonism and ancient Roman law. And one of the things we ultimately learned from that episode was that while Augustine and Jerome enjoyed robust classical educations in the centuries-old traditions of Greco-Roman civilization, following the collapse of the western empire during the 400s, their successors did not. Instead, later generations, among them Isidore’s, were likely to learn their science from Christians like Augustine and Ambrose who were versed in primary pagan sources, or Christians who used Christians who used pagan sources. Increasingly, after the 400s, Christian intellectual history became ever more distant from original pagan source texts, as the interests in the Latin west increasingly shifted away from the secular to the spiritual and clerical.

We can see this process having taken place all over Isidore’s Etymologies – junctures in which he has Eusebius but not, say, Tacitus; where he has Jerome but not Ammianus Marcellinus. By the sixth and seventh centuries, put simply, Christians were learning even some of their paganism from other Christians, and the result was a broad de-secularization of fields that had long had nothing to do with religion or God. Thus, to some extent, Isidore sat down to write On the Nature of Things to tell his contemporaries not to be silly – that the world was round, and that a few eclipses didn’t mean the end of days was nigh. As much as this hardheaded investment in established science drove his project though, by 612 CE, the literate Latin classes, though they still dribbled Virgil and Lucan and Ovid from their pores, were two centuries into the Christianization of the Latin world, proper. Rain, and clouds, and thunder would not be just rain, and clouds, and thunder again for a long time. [music]

The Long Term Impact of Isidore of Seville

There are two things we still have left to accomplish in this show, and they’re both very straightforward. The first is to consider what Isidore’s own conception of his work must have been in the early seventh century of the Visigothic Kingdom. The second is to have a quick tour of the long-term impact of Isidore’s works. Let’s start by considering how Isidore himself considered his output – what he considered as the ultimate value of his life’s work.

Isidore, as I mentioned before, wrote a history of the Goths. The full title of this work is the History of the Kings of the Goths, Vandals and Suevi, and when he finished a complete version in 624, the book gave Isidore’s own Visigothic nation a prominent place in the history of the world. The Goths were not, in Isidore’s history, a group of scrappy latecomers to the longer story of the Roman empire. They were instead the scions of the ancient Scythians, and the offspring of the Old Testament kingdoms of Gog and Magog. As such, the Visigoths (in Isidore’s innovative interpretation, at least), were of a more ancient pedigree than the Romans. And symbolically, Isidore’s history of the Goths ended with the ouster of the Byzantine enclave from Spanish shores in the year 624 by Visigothic King Suinthila. This enclave had been a bite mark taken out of Visigothic territory for 75 years. For those 75 years, the enclave had been a source of discomfiture for Visigothic Spain – the foothold of an eastern, Greek power, and one which, by the Catholic Hispano-Romans of the 620s, was regarded as alien and disruptive to the culture of the Iberian Peninsula. Its fall, then, was that moment that, to the patriotic Visigothic imagination, at least, marked a religiously unified Catholic Visigothic nation, led by kings like Suinthila and bishops like Isidore, and the consignment of imperial Roman power to the dustbin of the past.

The triumphalism and manifest destiny of Isidore’s Gothic history marks his more general optimism about the future. In Isidore’s historical writings, Visigothic kings are the rightful heirs of the Roman emperors. Since the Book of Revelation, Christianity had been deploying fearsome rhetoric against the Roman empire as a whole, an ideological position that had come to its full maturity in Augustine’s City of God. Almost 200 years after Augustine completed his masterpiece, Isidore saw a world in which Rome’s old aristocracy had largely dissolved, Rome’s polytheistic cultural history had been drowned by Christian floodwaters, and Rome’s last beachhead in the western Mediterranean had just been removed. The Visigothic monarchs who had effected this removal, particularly Suinthila, were the lords of a fresh new Catholic kingdom, and the descendants of peoples mentioned in the Old Testament.

When we consider the prolific output of Isidore of Seville, then, we have to remember the context of his adult life. A powerful bishop, and an architect of ecclesiastical order on the Iberian Peninsula, Isidore also saw his responsibilities also extending into intellectual history. He understood social reforms and educational curriculum updates as necessary parts of the cultural modernization of Visigothic Spain. He believed in orthodoxy not only in regard to the correct apprehension of scriptures, but also correct grammar, pronunciation, law, and organization of church offices. His careerlong desire to collect, organize, and package information for posterity was epitomized by his records of thousands and thousands of etymologies for Latin words. He is often, like Boethius, understood as a Janus-faced figure, looking at the past and future simultaneously, but the future must have looked a lot brighter Isidore than it did for poor, imprisoned Boethius.²⁷ Isidore had lived to see the Catholic Church partner with a powerful European monarchical dynasty, and indeed he and his brother had been parts of brokering this partnership. Though during his youth, the Visigothic dynasty had been Arian, and Hispano-Romans like his family had been a social class marked off by separate laws, during his adulthood and senior years, Visigothic leadership had gone all in on Catholicism, and the old class differences between Hispano-Roman and Visigoth were rapidly washing away. In his 50s and 60s, with history changing so quickly, it must have felt like time to slow down, to collect and sort what information was available, and to organize this information in such a way that other churchmen like him, busy with their own professional obligations, would realistically be able to make use of it on down the road.

As it turned out, Isidore played his cards quite well. Today, over a thousand manuscripts of the Etymologies have made it down to us from nearly every century and region of the Latin-speaking world. The oldest scraps of the Etymologies we have date to the mid-600s – not long after Isidore’s death – scraps discovered in modern-day Switzerland, but bearing the marks of Irish scribes. Elsewhere in Britannia, Isidore’s work found circulation early on. The great Northumbrian scholar Bede himself, born a generation after Isidore passed away, knew the book well, and through Bede’s influence in the early 700s, the Etymologies reached Alcuin of York during the later 700s, and through him, the circles of Charlemagne and the German scholar Rabanus Maurus, whose own encyclopedic work bore the stamp of Isidore’s.

After the eleventh century, Europe’s Latin clergymen tended to produce an encyclopedia or dictionary along the lines of Isidore’s every half century or so. A text called the Liber Glossarum, done perhaps during the late 700s, repurposed much of Isidore’s work, just as he had repurposed the work of others, being the first alphabetically organized Latin encyclopedia. Isidore’s book is organized by topic, as I mentioned before, which actually adds to its readability but subtracts from its instantaneous usability as a reference work. Another alphabetically arranged encyclopedia, complete with etymologies, emerged out of Italy in about 1053.²⁸ A century later, the English Benedictine Monk Osbern of Gloucester compiled a similar work called the Panoramio, and around 1200, Hugutio, the Bishop of Ferrara tried his hand at the etymological encyclopedia with a work called the Liber Derivationum. In the mid-1200s, Guillelmus Brito, a Franciscan master working in Paris, wrapped up a book called the Summa, another alphabetized encyclopedia and dictionary, drawing very heavily form Isidore, and in 1276, Giovanni Balbi of Genoa completed the Catholicon, an encyclopedic dictionary to top all of its predecessors. The Etymologies inspired more works than just these – the format of the topically organized encyclopedia inspired an ever-ballooning series of medieval reference books epitomized by Thomas of Cantimpré’s Nature of Things, done in about 1245 and weighting in at about three million words. All of these texts, directly or by means of copying one another, devoured and recycled what Isidore had written in the Etymologies, which, due to its vintage, usability, and availability, was more popular than any of them.

By the 1300s and 1400s, Isidore remained on many European desks. Dante offers him a prominent place in Paradiso. Boccacio gobbled up Isidore, perhaps indirectly.²⁹ Petrarch read Isidore studiously, considered Isidore’s source materials, and conscientiously cited Isidore as a reputable expert. William Langland quoted him directly in Piers Plowman.³⁰ Chaucer uses Isidore’s etymologies in the Second Nun’s Tale to explain the name of Saint Cecilia, though he had read them in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, a massively popular hagiographic reference work that also, like everything else in the Middle Ages, made extensive use of Isidore of Seville. A century after Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, Isidore’s Etymologies was put into print for the first time in the year 1472, the Etymologies having been an overwhelmingly popular book in the Latin-speaking world for 836 years. Ten additional editions of the Etymologies were printed before 1500, demonstrating that demand for the book was unextinguished during the Renaissance and on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.

One of the greatest cultural creations of Late Antiquity, then, the Etymologies perhaps deserves a bit more notoriety than it receives today. Pope John Paul II, in the early days of the internet, proposed Isidore as the internet’s patron saint, as the ancient bishop of Visigothic Spain indeed tried to make a compendium of human knowledge and pass it down, with an emphasis on usability and a commensurate de-emphasis on originality. And while the Etymologies will likely never again be the indispensable volume it was for so much of European history, its story still serves as a useful introduction to the Middle Ages.

We have read two Late Antique authors in our show – Boethius and Isidore – whose popularity over the Middle Ages came not so much from their daring originality, but instead from what they synthesized. Boethius, as we learned several episodes ago, didn’t break any new ground with the Consolation of Philosophy. Instead, Boethius formulated some of the more profound questions philosophers had asked up to that point, and put them into a succinct dialogue. In much the same way, Isidore isn’t a very original thinker. The editors of the recent Cambridge edition of the Etymologies describe Isidore as “complacently derivative” (14) and, in a description of the Etymologies, note that “It is written in easy Latin, in relentlessly utilitarian prose” (19). Relentlessly utilitarian might not be ideal for critical plaudits or intellectual awards. But relentlessly utilitarian proved to be just the thing for broad circulation among Europe’s educated classes for centuries. For clerics who believed in the traditions of orthodoxy, an omnibus like Isidore’s, because it was so serviceable, established, and steeped in the origins of things, was a book worth copying and reading.

As voluminous as Isidore’s works are, though, when we read them in the wake of a modern survey of classical antiquity, as we are in this podcast right now, they show us a world already centuries into the Middle Ages. Isidore’s knowledge of classical literature and history, like Augustine’s before him, was limited to a small sliver of pagan Latin texts that had, for various reasons, passed muster for clerical readers. Isidore’s fluency with classical sciences was equally limited by cultural climate and language barriers. The energetic clergymen of the seventh century devoted themselves to pursuits less romantic than individualistic self-expression and the pursuit of originality. Their desire was rooted in the collectivistic goals of the Catholic church – replicating and expanding dioceses and bishoprics, replicating and expanding churches, nunneries and monasteries, replicating orthodoxy and expanding knowledge about it, and if they had time and energy, as Isidore somehow did, passing the fascinating stuff of pagan antiquity down to their successors, most often, with a thick coating of Christian varnish.[music]

Moving on to Season 7

Well, everybody, that takes us through Isidore of Seville, and the Etymologies. I was actually in Seville just a few weeks ago, and looking at some of the famous sights, it was hard not to reflect on just how pivotal the decades of Isidore’s life were there – again he lived from 560-636. If things had gone a bit differently, Spain might have stayed Arian, preserving the heterodoxy of early Christianity longer; or, alternately, Byzantine Andalusia might have become a longer fixture in world history than it ultimately was. Isidore, however, saw Spain consolidate and turn Catholic, and having close ties to royalty and being part a bishop, he must have lived into relative old age content that history was headed in the right direction. He would have been surprised, as an old Gallo-Roman gentleman, to learn that Visigothic, Catholic Spain only had about three generations of existence left. He would have been equally surprised to learn that he was a contemporary of the most important person on earth during the early seventh century, and that neither he, nor any of his contemporaries had ever heard of this person.

Isidore of Seville wrote of faraway lands to the east with the same cavalier mythmaking that had characterized his predecessors Herodotus and Ctesias, telling tall tales about Libya, and India, and Scythia. But east of Libya, and west of India, and south of Scythia, when Isidore was precisely fifty years old, something happened that totally changed the direction of world history. That something was the Prophet Muhammad’s first revelation in a cave atop Mount Hira, Mecca. This revelation, and the rupturing of Byzantine and Sasanian power in the Near East a generation later, would unleash a cataract of energy into central Eurasia – military energy, theological and intellectual energy, and cultural syntheses that would ultimately produce the most advanced civilization of the early Middle Ages. The old Byzantine and Sasanian logjam, once cleared up in the mid-600s, saw the rise of a new, tri-continental culture rooted in the Arabian Peninsula, itself the size of Western Europe to begin with.

In the next show, Episode 109, “Cornerstones,” we’re going to finally bring our season on Late Antiquity to a close, and begin our sequence on Early Islamic History. We have been in Late Antiquity for a long time, at this point, both because it is a complex, long period of history, and also because your host has been slow. As we wrap up this 24-program, 50-hour sequence on Late Antiquity, we will not only have completed a season. We will effectively have completed the first part of the old triptych of Classical, Medieval, and Modern, moving on, as I’m sure most of us are ready to, to the literature and cultural history of the Middle Ages for a while.

One quick announcement. I’m planning to release two episodes next month – one, as I said, will be the review and season closer, Episode 109, Cornerstones, along with a new 5-episode bonus series. The other will be Episode 110, Questions. By popular demand I’m taking questions from all of you, as I announced on Patreon and social media a couple of weeks back. Email me a question at literatureandhistoryguy@gmail.com, or better yet, make a cell phone recording on whatever audio recording app you have – just say your name, where you’re from and then ask the question – in other words, this is Doug, I’m from California, you know, that kind of thing – and ask the question. I’d love to have some of your voices on here, and feel free to ask any questions you want – academic, personal, ridiculous and silly – I’ll do my best to answer all of them. Episode 110 will be for everyone, but, optional, of course – if you are not interested in listening to questions about me or how the show is made, you can just skip 110 and go on to 111. So that’s the announcement.

I have a quiz on this program available there in the notes of your podcast app if you want to test what you’ve learned about Visigothic Spain and Isidore of Seville. For you Patreon supporters, I’ve recorded the entirety of Oscar Wilde’s long poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” I had intended to record this masterpiece a few episodes ago, but I forgot. Anyway, check it out, especially if you’ve never read it – it’s not a cheery ballad, but it’s one of the great long poems of modern literature. For everybody, I have a song coming up – jump ship now if you want to skip it, and otherwise, stay aboard.

Still listening? So, I got to thinking about Isidore of Seville, and how he and his contemporaries would actually interpret nature as though they were doing biblical exegesis. And honestly, I thought that was pretty goofy. Exegesis alone is silly sometimes, but exegesis of pigeons and fungus and glaciers – man, that is really, really silly. Etymology, too, when you read all of Isidore’s Etymologies – etymology can be pretty absurd, especially when the etymologist in question is straining for a connection that isn’t there. I got to thinking about that, and imagined what would happen if Isidore had a few drinks and just let his mind wander, and I wrote this song, which is called “Drunk Isidore.” I hope you enjoy it, and next time, we’ll review what we’ve learned over these past 21 episodes, and get a preview of what’s inbound in the season to come. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and I’ll see you next time.

[“Drunk Isidore” Song]

References

---