Etymologies of Isidore of Seville
Etimologías de Isidoro de Sevilla
- Date
- c. 615-636 · confidence medium
- Place
- Seville, Andalusia, Spain
- Credited to
- Isidore of Seville (work completed by Braulio of Zaragoza)
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A twenty-book compendium that organises the learning of Antiquity around the origin of words: grammar, medicine, law, agriculture, minerals and animals. It was the standard encyclopaedia of the early medieval West and survives in hundreds of manuscripts.
Isidore compiles and reorders earlier sources (Pliny, Varro, Servius, Lactantius); his originality lies in organisation, not content. It was unfinished at his death (636) and was arranged into books by Braulio of Zaragoza.
What it led to
- transmission of classical Latin learning to early medieval Europe
- a model for later medieval encyclopaedias
- the Isidorian T-O world map, spread in thousands of copies
Built on
- Pliny the Elder's Naturalis historia