Isidore of Seville, Etymologies (or 'Origins'), in Latin with short quotations in Greek, decorated manuscript on vellum [England, mid-twelfth century]

provenance

1. Written and decorated in the mid-twelfth century, most probably for an English monastic community, perhaps that of the Benedictine Priory of Brewood (established by 1150) or the Augustinian Priory of St. Leonard, Brewood (flourishing by 1189). Both were dissolved in 1537-8, their buildings and contents passing to Thomas Giffard by 1550, and by descent to his heirs in Chillington Hall, Staffordshire, where this volume was in the nineteenth century (bookplate).

A fine and handsome Romanesque manuscript of the most important scientific reference work of the Middle Ages

text

Isidore of Seville (c.560-636) towers like a colossus over the dawn of the Middle Ages and modern Western society. He was one of the last humanist polymaths of antiquity and one of early Christianity's most influential scholars. This text is his greatest work, an encyclopaedia encompassing such diverse topics as grammar (book I, fol.5r), rhetoric (II, fol.25r), mathematics (III, fol.40v, including music and astronomy), medicine (IIII, fol.53v), law (IV, fol.57r), the Bible (with sections on writing materials and libraries, specifically the use of papyrus for the earliest copies of the Bible, and the invention of parchment in the city of Pergamon, hence its name), the Church and celestial beings (VI-VIII, fol.68r), the languages of men and the alphabet (IX-X, fol.110), humans (XI, fol.137r; including the functioning of their body parts and the ages of their history), animals, fish and birds (XII, fol.146v), the elements (XIII, fol.163r), earth and heaven (XIV, fol.172r,), cities and rural life (XV, fol.184v), stones, metals and gems (XVI, fol. 196v), agriculture (XVII, fol.211r), war and games (XVIII-IXX, fol.225r, with sections on arms, the circus, wrestling, dramatic and orchestral performances, gladiators and dice and ballgames), and finally food and drink (XX, fol.246v; here ending imperfectly with "...a tortis herbis que accumbentium"). It stands at the head of the tradition of pagan Roman encyclopaedists, uniting their works to produce a single vast book encompassing, as Bishop Braulio (d. 651; whose correspondence with Isidore commissioning the work can be found here on fols.1v-4v) records, the entire scope of "the knowledge of human and divine matters".  It was a vast undertaking, and took the author's entire lifetime to compose.

Isidore was part of the intellectual renaissance in the Visigothic court in the seventh century, and was notably close to King Sigebut (c.565-620/1), to whom the first version of this work was dedicated. It has been suggested that he composed it as a form of summa for his recently-civilised barbarian masters. If so, it soon found another audience in the clergy, and became the most widely consulted scientific reference work of the Middle Ages. It survives today in nearly a thousand manuscripts (Barney et al., Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 2006, p.24), and by 800AD. copies of it could be found in all the cultural centres of Europe.

The central thesis of the work remains at the heart of modern science and our increasingly computer-based society, as the grandest medieval product of what we would now call a database. On a number of occasions Isidore repeats information from his sources verbatim, indicating that to sift through his many hundreds of sources and organise the thousands of fragments of information into chapters, he invented a filing system similar to a card-catalogue, but most probably using slips of parchment which he called schedae: "A scheda is a thing still being emended, and not yet redacted into books" (VI.xiv.8, here fol.73v). In recognition of this in 2006, Pope John Paul II proposed that Isidore be recognised as the patron saint of the Internet and computer users.