The Astronomy of Isidore of Seville

This paper surveys the presentation of astronomical knowledge in two encyclopedic writings of Isidore of Seville, Etymologies and On the Nature of Things , as a transformative episode in the history of early medieval astronomy. In the section De Astronomia in Etymologies , Book III, Isidore provides a (re)formulation of the field of astronomy as follows: (1) he narrows and defines its scope under a Christian framework, demarcating it from as- trology labelled ‘superstitious’ from the view of faith; and (2) he applies a characteristic etymological approach instead of mathematical calculations and geometrical models, changing the study of astronomy from an investiga- tive enterprise into a text-based, hermeneutic learning. Sometimes this is at the expense of mathematical knowledge left available to him by earlier Latin authors. In the treatment of the seven planets in On the Nature of Things , Isidore more evidently imposes Christian themes on the basis of an Aristotelian–Ptolemaic cosmology, declaring the authority of scriptural assertions over ‘pagan’ natural philosophy on the structure of the heavens, and demonstrating the orderliness of the world as divine creation by a schema of concentric spheres. Through the works of Isidore, what took place was not simply the loss and decline of Greek and Hellenistic astronomy, but rather a conscious and methodological transformation of this area of knowledge, which was to become typical for medie- val Latin encyclopedias, subsuming late Antique legacies of learning under the newly formed Christian world-pic- ture and social realities

Ancient history · Geography · Late Antiquity · Middle Ages · Classics · Historical Astronomy and Related Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · History of Medicine Studies

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