Isidore of Seville was born around 560 in Spain, under the unstable rule of the Visigoths after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. His older brother, Leander, the abbot of a Sevillemonastery, supervised Isidore's

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Etymologiae presents in abbreviated form much of that part of the learning of antiquity that Christians thought worth preserving. Etymologies, often very far-fetched, form the subject

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The Etymologies organizes knowledge, mainly drawn from the classics, into twenty books:
In Book I, Isidore begins with a lengthy section on the first of three subjects in the mediaeval Trivium, considered at the time the core of essential

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Almost 1000 manuscript copies of Etymologiae have survived. The earliest is held at the St. Gall Abbey library, Switzerland, in the Codex Sangallensis: it is a 9th-century copy of books XI to XX. The 13th-century Codex Gigas, the largest extant medieval

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• Barney, Stephen A.; Lewis, W. J.; Beach, J.A.; Berghof, O. (2006). The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press.

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• Summary of contents in English (starts on page 57)
• Codex Guelferbytanus 64 Weissenburgensis (Herzog August Bibliothek)

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Medieval to Renaissance
Isidore was widely influential throughout the Middle Ages, feeding directly into word lists and encyclopaedias by Papias, Huguccio,

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