Isidōrus
（
Ἰσίδωρος). A Spaniard who, from the beginning of the
seventh century, was bishop of Seville (in Latin
Hispalis, whence he is called
Hispalensis). He died about A.D. 636. He possessed a width of reading which was remarkable for
his time, and an extraordinary faculty for collecting information. Next to Boëtius
and Cassiodorus, he exercised the most important influence upon the general culture and
literature of the Middle Ages. Besides works on grammar, theology, and history (including a
chronicle of the world to his own day, and histories of the Goths, Vandals, and Suevi), he
composed in the last years of his life his greatest and most important work—an
immense but imperfect encyclopaedic survey of all knowledge, in twenty books, entitled the
Etymologiae or
Origines, from its often very capricious
and marvellous explanations of the various subjects of which it treats. Though it is only a
vast congeries of collected excerpts, devoid of a single original idea, it is nevertheless
important owing to the variety of its contents and its citations from writings now lost, such
as those of Suetonius. Another work, which is similarly a compilation, but was greatly used in
the Middle Ages, is his
De Natura Rerum, a handbook of natural history.
The complete text of Isidorus is given in the Abbé Migne's
Patrologia
Latina, 4 vols., reprinted from Arevalo
(1850). The
De Natura
Rerum is edited separately by G. Becker
(Berlin, 1857), and the
Origines in Lindemann's
Corpus Grammaticorum Veterum
(Leipzig, 1833), by Otto.
