Isidore writes the Etymologies

The story

A bishop of the Visigoths

Isidore was born around AD 560 at Cartagena, in Spain, in a territory that was then still partly under the Byzantines. His parents died when he was young, and he was brought up by his elder brother Leander, who was bishop of Seville. When Leander died, in 601, Isidore took his place. He remained bishop for more than thirty years, until his death on 4 April 636.

Isidore's Spain was ruled by the Visigothic kings, a Germanic people we spoke of in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms. In his time the Visigoths had recently left Arianism for Catholicism, and bishops had a very important role. Isidore presided over the second and third provincial councils of Seville and the fourth national council of Toledo, in 633: meetings of bishops in which the rules of the Church were discussed, and also matters of the kingdom.

A man who wanted to preserve knowledge

Isidore lived at a time when the Roman world was by now over. He chose to do an enormous task: to gather in a single work everything that was known. He wrote a great deal: a treatise on nature called De natura rerum, which starts from time and the sky and goes on to climate, the sea and the earth; a history of the Goths, the Vandals and the Suevi; a rule for monks of 25 chapters; the three books of the Sentences, which are his second most read text in the Middle Ages, with more than five hundred surviving manuscripts. But his most famous work is the Etymologies.

The Etymologies

The Latin title is Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, that is, “Twenty books of etymologies or origins”. The basic idea was this: to understand something well you have to understand where its name comes from. Isidore was convinced that the form of a word revealed the essence of what it meant. So, every time he spoke of something, he went back to its origin.

The twenty books touch on almost every subject. The first three are devoted to the liberal arts, that is, the subjects studied at school: grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, then arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The fourth is about medicine, the fifth about laws and time. Next come the books on the Church, on God and the angels, on languages and peoples. Then we move on to human beings and animals, the world and the earth, buildings and fields, stones and metals, agriculture, war and games, ships and clothes, and finally the house and household tools. Book ten is the only one in alphabetical order, and collects words with their explanation.

How much did Isidore write himself? Little: a large part of the content comes from older authors, Roman and Christian, whom he summarised and put in order. His merit lies precisely in having saved and organised this knowledge.

Right etymologies, fanciful etymologies

Some explanations are correct. Isidore derives dominus, “master”, from domus, “house”: and indeed the dominus was the master of the house. Others are fanciful. Wine, in Latin vinum, for him comes from the veins, venae, because it “refreshes” the veins. Cheeks, genae, and knees, genua, would be linked because in the mother's womb the child's body is curled up and the knees touch the cheeks. Today we know that modern linguistics does not work like this, but for Isidore and his readers the explanation was a way of remembering.

An unfinished work

Isidore worked on the Etymologies for years. When he fell ill he could not finish the final revision and entrusted the task to his pupil Braulio, bishop of Saragossa. Braulio himself had asked him to send him the books complete and well connected, because fragmentary versions were circulating. The text dates, in its final form, to about 636, but the work began much earlier: for this reason scholars speak of a work written over several years, whose exact year is not known, and the timeline places it around 625.

Success over the centuries

After the Bible, the Etymologies were one of the most copied texts of the Middle Ages: about a thousand manuscripts survive. For centuries it was a central educational text. The work influenced the great dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the later Middle Ages. The English poet Chaucer knew it, and Dante, in the Paradiso, places Isidore in the Heaven of the Sun, among the wise spirits.

In 1472 the Etymologies were among the first medieval works to be printed, at Augsburg, in Germany, by Günther Zainer. In that edition, in book XIV, the first printed map of the world appears.

Isidore is venerated as a saint and is a Doctor of the Church. Many people consider him, unofficially, the patron saint of the internet.