We know relatively little about his life. He was born in the middle of the sixth century, with Spain under Germanic Visigothic rule. His Catholic bishopric began in 600, and his close relationship with King Sisebut enabled him to follow both an influential political career and a humanist religious path. Etymologiae (sometimes called Origins) was composed in his scriptorium (writing house) and intended as ‘a grand tour of civilisation, starting with an outline of the formal curriculum of the ancient classroom and ending with a helter-skelter of mundane details about the objects to be found in a Roman garden or stable’. It was that standard thing – a compendium of all knowledge in the known world. But its author never meant it as a reference work, and certainly not something to be dipped into in search of a single fact.*
After Isidore’s death Etymologiae was divided by his pupil Braulio into twenty books, and the table of contents alone may leave us overawed, for here were the most important things in life:
Grammar and its parts.
Rhetoric and dialectic.
Mathematics, whose parts are arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.
Medicine.
Laws and the instruments of the judiciary, and times.
The order of Scripture, cycles and canons, liturgical feasts and offices.
God and angels, prophetic nomenclature, names of the holy fathers, martyrs, clerics, monks, and other names.
Church and synagogue, religion and faith, heresies, philosophers, poets, sibyls, magicians, pagans, gods of the gentiles.
Languages of the nations, royal, military, and civic terminology, family relationships.
Certain terms in alphabetical order.
Human beings and their parts, the ages of humans, portents and metamorphoses.
Four-footed animals, creeping animals, fish, and flying animals.
Elements, that is, the heavens and the air, waters, the sea, rivers and floods.
Earth, paradise, the regions of the whole globe, islands, mountains, other terms for places, and the lower regions of the earth.
Cities, urban and rural buildings, fields, boundaries and measures of fields, roads.
Earthy materials from land or water, every kind of gem and precious and base stones, ivory likewise, treated along with marble, glass, all the metals, weights and measures.
Agriculture, crops of every kind, vines and trees of every kind, herbs and all vegetables.
Wars and triumphs and the instruments of war, the Forum, spectacles, games of chance and ball games.
Ships, ropes, and nets, iron workers, the construction of walls and all the implements of building, also wool-working, ornaments, and all kinds of clothing.
Tables, foodstuffs, drink, and their vessels, vessels for wine, water, and oil, vessels of cooks, bakers, and lamps, beds, chairs, vehicles, rural and garden implements, equestrian equipment.
And then there were the subheads. To take just Book 1 (Grammar), we encounter Discipline and art; The common letters of the alphabet; The Latin letters; The parts of speech; Accents; Signs used in law; Epistolary codes; Schemas; Tropes; Meters.
In an introduction to the first full English version in 2006, the translators select several bits of amusing and unreliable lore from each of the books, asides that may have caused a seventh-century Irish monk or an Italian poet from the thirteenth century to look up briefly from their work and wonder about the man who compiled them.*
From Book 1: Caesar Augustus used a secret (although hardly unbreakable) code in which he replaced each letter with the following letter of the alphabet, b for a, etc.
Book 3: The term ‘cymbal’ derives from the Greek words for ‘with’ and ‘dancing’.
Book 6: Architects use green Carystean marble to panel libraries, because the green refreshes weary eyes.
Book 11: In the womb, the knees (genua) of the foetus are pressed against the face, and help to form the eye-sockets (genae).
Book 12: The ibis purges itself by spewing water into its anus with its beak.
Book 20: Wine (vinum) is so called because it replenishes the veins (vena) with blood.
And what of the title itself? Isidore was deeply interested in origin stories, of philosophies and disciplines, not least rhetoric and physics. And he was fascinated by the regions where things (metals, spices, birds) were first identified.
Pliny was not Isidore’s only source. He found much to reproduce from the writings of Servius, Donatus, Palladius and Nonius Marcellus, as well as the Christian writers Jerome and Augustine. Unlike Pliny, Isidore’s work for the Church precluded him from conducting much research of his own; he didn’t travel much, and there are scant original narrative observations of the sort found in Tacitus. His work was an abridgement and a bridge, a link between late antiquity and medieval Christian scholarship, between the Greek and Roman Empires and those of the pagans and Visigoths. Isidore had a term for his method, something he considered a viable new trade: ‘compilator’. He defined this as ‘one who mixes the words of others with his own, just as those making pigments crush many different [colours] in the mortar.’ He also saw himself as a gardener, selecting textual ‘flowers’ as he went.
Consulting Etymologiae today we may revel in that combination of pleasures an old encyclopaedia never fails to provide – illumination, bafflement and the invaluable impression of an age. Within Isidore’s orchard we find:
BIRDS: There is a single word for birds, but various kinds, for just as they differ among themselves in appearance, so do they differ also in the diversity of their natures. Some are simple, like the dove, and others clever, like the partridge; some enjoy the company of humans, like the swallow, while others prefer a secluded life in deserted places, like the turtledove … Some make a racket with their calls, like the swallow. Some produce the sweetest songs, like the swan and the blackbird, while others imitate the speech and voices of humans, like the parrot and the magpie. But there are innumerable others differing in kind and behaviour, for no one can discover how many kinds of birds there are.
BRONZE: The ancients used bronze before they used iron. Indeed, at first they would plow the earth with bronze; with bronze weapons they would wage war; and bronze was more prized, while gold and silver were rejected as useless. Now, according to Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, it is the opposite: ‘Bronze is despised and gold has attained the highest honor: thus time in its turning changes the positions of things, and what was prized becomes finally without value.’
BALL GAMES: A ball (pila) is properly so called because it is stuffed with hair (pilus). It is also a ‘sphere’ (sphera), so called from ‘carrying’ (ferre) or ‘striking’ (ferire). Among the types of ball games are ‘trigon-ball’ (trigonaria) and ‘arena-ball’ (arenata). Arena-ball, which is played in a group, when, as the ball is thrown in from the circle of bystanders and spectators, they would catch it beyond a set distance and begin the game. They call it the ‘elbow-game’ (cubitalis) when two people at close quarters and with their elbows almost joined strike the ball. Those who pass the ball to their fellow players by striking it with the out-stretched lower leg are said to ‘give it the calf’ (suram dare).
The influence of Etymologiae was wide, informing all the cultural centres of Europe before the Enlightenment. Almost 1000 manuscript copies survive, and it was among the earliest texts to have benefitted from Gutenberg’s printing press. Bede referred to Etymologiae extensively, and its author was immortalised more than 500 years later by Dante, whose Divine Comedy (c.1320) concludes with the dancing souls of solar illumination: ‘See, flaming beyond, the burning spirit of Isidore.’