Isidore of Seville and Book XII of the Etymologies
How Isidore of Seville organised knowledge of animals in Book XII of the Etymologies, explaining each creature through the origin of its name.
If the Physiologus gave the bestiaries their allegorical spirit, Isidore of Seville gave them much of their material. Bishop of the Andalusian city from the early seventh century until his death in 636, Isidore composed the Etymologies, also called Origins, an encyclopedia in twenty books meant to gather the knowledge of antiquity in orderly form. Its twelfth book, devoted to animals, became an inexhaustible source for compilers in the following centuries.
An encyclopedia for a changing world
Isidore lived in Visigothic Spain, a kingdom that had recently abandoned Arianism for Catholicism. In that setting the transmission of Latin culture was a practical concern: the ancient schools had vanished and books were becoming scarce. The Etymologies were written to offer clergy and scholars a compendium of grammar, rhetoric, medicine, law, geography, natural history and much more.
The work was unfinished when its author died. It was his friend Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza, who divided it into books. Its success was enormous: the Etymologies survive in a great many manuscripts and were among the most frequently copied texts of the entire Latin Middle Ages. Braulio himself, in a surviving letter, recalls having long urged his friend to complete the work. In the following centuries the Etymologies became a basic textbook in the monastic and cathedral schools of all Europe.
The name as the key to nature
Isidore’s method is announced by the title. He was convinced that the name of a thing reveals its essence, and that tracing its origin makes it possible to understand it. Book XII opens by recalling that Adam gave names to all living beings: ‘Omnibus animantibus Adam primum vocabula indidit’. From there it proceeds by groups, from flocks and beasts of burden to wild beasts, from small animals to serpents, worms, fish and birds.
Many etymologies are ingenious and entirely unfounded for modern linguistics. The beaver, castor, would be so called a castrando, after the legend that it castrates itself to escape hunters. The fox, vulpes, would owe its name to the nimbleness of its feet. Wild beasts, bestiae, would be named after the violence of their fury. The value of these links lies not in philological truth but in their power to fix a trait of the animal in the memory.
Sources and legacy
Isidore draws on Pliny the Elder, on Solinus, on commentators on Virgil such as Servius and on the Church Fathers. Compared with the Physiologus, his tone is descriptive rather than allegorical: he does not read every animal as a figure of Christ or the devil, but records the properties tradition ascribed to it, including many ancient beliefs presented as matters of fact.
For this very reason the bestiaries of the second family, such as those of Aberdeen and Ashmole, inserted whole Isidorian passages next to the moralisations of the Physiologus. The result was a layered text, in which the natural fact and the spiritual lesson live side by side on the same page. The reader often found, one after the other, Isidore's definition of the animal and its spiritual reading, with no warning of the shift from one register to the other.
Reading Book XII today means entering the workshop from which the zoological vocabulary of the Middle Ages emerged. Many images that seem to have been born in the cloister, from the lion that wipes out its tracks to the lynx with its precious urine, are in fact ancient reports that Isidore saved, ordered and handed on to the centuries that followed. Without him, many of those images would have been lost.