The etymologies of Isidore of Seville and the greek-roman culture transmission in Visigothic Spain

Abstract

This article presents a reading of the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, a seventeenth-century Spanish bishop, as a manual for the formation of clerics and lay people, taking as its main axis the transmission (and emulation) of Greco-Roman culture in Visigothic Spain. Taking Isidore as an educator, we insert his work in the Visigothic context to understand how his manual presents contents of Greco-Roman culture as ideal and worthy of emulation, with special emphasis on government, history, the liberal arts, nature, man and society. The establishment and legitimacy of the kingdom would be connected with the method of reproducing the manuscripts of roman culture, actions that would reach a peak under the direction of the bishop Isidore of Seville: Royal counselor, administrator of monasteries and ‘bishop schools’, which would train man fit to be agents both of the royal and ecclesiastic powers. Being a major Church authority in the peninsula, he helped to consolidate the legitimacy of the Visigothic kingdom in the territory. The analysis of the best known work of the bishop of Seville reveals both the use of the classical roman culture in the recent ‘barbarian’ kingdom as the great value associated to it by these men, as well as exposes the mindset and conceptions about the world and the society of that context.