Isidore of Seville compiles the Etymologies

Isidore (c. 560–636) succeeded his elder brother Leander as bishop of Seville in 600 or 601 and became the leading scholar of Visigothic Spain: a friend and adviser of King Sisebut, the author of a chronicle and of a history of the Goths, and the president of the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633. He probably began the Etymologies around 615, though by other accounts he started as early as about 600. An early draft was dedicated to Sisebut before the king’s death in 621; at the urging of his friend Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza, Isidore went on with the work and around 632–633 sent him a fuller text to correct. It was still unfinished when Isidore died on 4 April 636, and Braulio divided it into twenty books (fifteen in some manuscripts of his note).

The books lead from the liberal arts, medicine, law and chronology through the Bible and the church, God, heresies and pagan gods, languages and peoples, a list of words, man and monsters, animals, the world and its geography, buildings, stones and metals, and agriculture, to war and games, ships, clothing, food and tools. Isidore explains each thing by the supposed origin of its name, and many of his derivations are fanciful. Almost everything is excerpted or paraphrased from earlier writers — Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Servius, Cassiodorus, Lactantius, the Church Fathers — whom he often does not name: the books on animals and geography lean largely on Pliny’s Natural History and on Solinus, and the chapters on dialectic on Boethius’s translations from the Greek.

For centuries the Etymologies served as the standard reference book of the Latin West. About a thousand manuscripts survive, the oldest a 7th-century fragment at St Gall; later encyclopedists drew on it, Dante placed Isidore in Paradise, and in 1472 in Augsburg it became one of the first printed books. Because readers used it instead of the classical works it summarized, some of those ceased to be copied and were lost — though Isidore’s excerpts in turn preserve pieces of lost texts, such as Suetonius’s Prata.