God’s Librarian: Isidore of Seville and His Literary Agenda

Abstract

What I hope to show in the following pages is that Isidore of Seville, seen in the mirror of his own words, aimed not to become catechist to centuries of priests and monks, nor indeed to achieve any great stylistic or generic innovation as such, but to carry through the scholarly project which he had set for himself: to take full stock of Classical civilisation and recatalogue it for good in the epistemology of God.