Isidore of Seville and his Reception in the Early Middle Ages

The editors of this volume (which launches a series on ‘Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia’), Andrew Fear and Jamie Wood, have gathered together nine essays, several originally papers for a one-day workshop at the Instituto Cervantes in Manchester in 2013, others commissioned, ‘to create [as Paul Fouracre writes in the preface] the first English-language collected volume on Isidore’. That such a claim seems worth staking in an age when academics of all nationalities routinely publish in English is a symptom of the special isolation of the Isidorian contingent. Monuments of scholarship on Isidore have so far appeared either in Latin (W.M. Lindsay’s 1911 Oxford edition of the Etymologiae) or under German auspices (C.H. Beeson’s 1913 Isidorstudien). In the second half of the last century, only Jocelyn Hillgarth stood shoulder to shoulder with such giants as Jacques Fontaine and Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz. Now we have a splendid annotated English translation of the Etymologies by Stephen A. Barney and others (2006), plus John Henderson’s The Medieval World of Isidore: Truth from Words (2007), a maverick classicist’s maddeningly stylish sortie into post-classical territory. The hub for the present volume is the University of Manchester, where the combined presence of Andrew Fear and Paul Fouracre has encouraged the kind of trafficking between classical, late antique and early medieval worlds that the patron saint of the internet invites. A page or two of information on contributors could have revealed the larger geography of these new Isidorian studies in English, the space easily spared if repetitive bibliographies had been consolidated

Ancient history · Art · Middle Ages · Classical Studies and Legal History · Classics · History · Medieval Iberian Studies · Medieval Literature and History