Isidore of Seville and his Reception in the Early Middle Ages: Transmitting and Transforming Knowledge (original) (raw)
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The English Historical Review, 2018
Scholarship on the Iberian Peninsula in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages is burgeoning across a variety of disciplines and time periods, yet the publication profile of the field remains disjointed. 'Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia' (LAEMI) provides a publication hub for high-quality research on Iberian Studies from the fields of history, archaeology, theology and religious studies, numismatics, palaeography, music, and cognate disciplines. Another key aim of the series is to break down barriers between the excellent scholarship that takes place in Iberia and Latin America and the Anglophone worlds.
Networks and Neighbours, 2013
CYBERSPACE Isidore of Seville (d. 636 AD) is a crucial figure in the selection, preservation and propagation of Classical and Patristic learning. He put such learning to varied use in his own day, in the process ensuring that it could be made useful for future generations. Because of the depth of what he preserved and the breadth of its diffusion, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Isidore the patron saint of the Internet in 1997. This one-day symposium was held at the Spanish cultural centre, the Instituto Cervantes (http://manchester.cervantes.es/en/default.shtm) on Deansgate in Manchester, UK on Thursday 18 th April 2013. We'd been working on the social, cultural and religious history of late antique Spain for the past few years and had been thinking about putting on a symposium on Isidore for a couple of years. Last year we started to think about this a bit more seriously and realised that 96 MICHAEL KELLY, JAMIE WOOD & ANDREW FEAR Networks and Neighbours
God's Librarian: Isidore of Seville and His Literary Agenda
A Companion to Isidore of Seville, 2020
Here I offer a series of impressionistic semblanzas of what I understand to be the essential elements of Isidore of Seville's context, personality, and literary agenda. When viewed through the lens of the Visigothic slate texts and their evidence for a continuous history of Latin literacy in the Iberian Peninsula, he comes newly into focus as operating still very much in a late Roman world. If we read his letters with care, we recognise too that Isidore was altogether less worldly than we have made him out to be; his priorities lay elsewhere, his thought and energy were spent in constant revision of both ancient knowledge and Patristic exegesis, memorialised in the complex transmission of his opera. And by attending in particular to his prefaces to those works, we perceive an anxious determination to render the universal manageable – and on his own terms.
Isidore of Seville and his Reception in the Early Middle Ages, 2016
In a volume dedicated to exposing and critically exploring the reception of Isidore of Seville and the complicated historiography about him, this essay brings the reader back to the very origins of the historical memory of Isidore. The aim is not only to introduce the reader to the inception of the written memory of Isidore, but also to problematize the natures of these first-generation historical representations. In so doing, the author shows that the long historiography on Isidore began as competing constellations for the memory of Isidore. There was never in the Visigothic Kingdom a singular representation of Isidore or agreement about the meaning and extent of his works or the significance of his life. The differing accounts illustrate the vigor that history-writing played in the fierce struggles for authority endemic to early medieval Hispania. They also demonstrate that any comprehensive account of the reception of Isidore must begin by showing the disagreements that characterized the original historiography of Isidore, which was displaced in the generations after his death and outside his network and kingdom.
Isidore of Seville's christology
‘Christ as the focus of Genesis Exegesis in Isidore of Seville,’ in T. Finan and V. Twomey eds, Studies in Patristic Christology (Four Courts Press, Dublin 1998), pp. 144-162.
Abstract: This paper explores Isidore of Seville's definitions of legal terms and Roman law concepts during the early Middle Ages. While Isidore was not a lawyer, he played a crucial role on the development of both legal theory and more technical aspects of the law such as legal procedure. Combining elements of Roman and Jewish-Christian traditions, Isidore's definitions were of the utmost importance during the long period leading to the dawn of the School of Bologna. Résumé : Dans ce papier sont explorées les définitions que donna Isidore de Séville au début du Moyen Âge des termes juridiques et concepts de droit romain. Sans être juriste, Isidore joua un rôle cucial dans le développement des théories juridiques et d'aspects plus techniques du droit comme la procédure juridique. Combinant des éléments de traditions romaine et judéo-chrétienne, les définitions d'Isidore furent d'une importance maximale durant la longue période qui conduisit à la naissance de l'École de Bologne.
the prefaces of these biblical commentaries as sites for authorial self-fashioning, as 'media to help shape how these works and how he as their author, would be received' (p. ). Much like his subject, the author boasts a linguistic virtuosity and attention to detail that lends his examination of Jerome's Pauline commentaries an unassailable authority. This is a model monograph that brings to light a longneglected facet of Jerome's exegetical production at a formative moment in his career as a biblical commentator. SCOTT G. BRUCE FORDHAM UNIVERSITY Schriftauslegung und Bildgebrauch bei Isidor von Pelusium. By Stefan Berkmüller. (Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, .) Pp. x + . Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter, . €.. ; JEH () ; doi:./S Little is covered in modern scholarship on the fifth-century epistolary corpus transmitted under the name of Isidore of Pelusium, somewhat surprising considering that it is one of the largest epistolary collections of late antiquity. In this context, the reworked version of Berkmüller's doctorate written at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich is a much needed and very welcome contribution. In chapter i Berkmüller revisits the history of the printed editions and examines the debates on the origin of the corpus and the authenticity of the author, wherein he pleadsfollowing the work of P. Évieuxin favour of Isidore's historical reliability as a letter-writer, and of the authenticity of (at least some of) his letters. This is then followed by a literature review covering Isidorian scholarship mainly of the last twenty years (chapter ii, especially pp. -). Berkmüller labels scholarship on Isidore since as 'naïve' for not scrutinising the authenticity of the letters (p. ), and more specifically for not referring (or doing so only marginally) to the positions taken by R. Riedinger and M. Kertsch who argue that the corpus is not authentic. Yet, in most cases, this is so mainly because Évieux's arguments of the previous decade against Riedinger's doubts have been generally accepted and form, for better or worse, the communis opinio; this is also the case of scholarship before the turn of the century, which is not discussed in this respect (for example, D. T. Runia [] and U. Treu []). In any case, since Berkmüller also follows Évieux on this matter, the insistence that recent scholarship should have discussed Riedinger's objections (irrespective of how different the focus of that scholarship may be) reads for the most part as a rhetorical introduction to his discussion of Évieux's arguments for Isidore's historicity, and thus as a safe basis for the study in the following chapters. In the remainder of the book, the author examines Isidore's understanding of Scripture that begins with an analysis of his exegetical letters classified according to modern exegetical criteria (chapters iii, iv). In chapter iii Isidore's views on the origin of Scripture, its divinely inspired character (p. ), canonicity (p. ) and the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments (p. ), lead Berkmüller to situate him among the mainstream Christian authors of the fourth and fifth centuries as an exegete. As for Isidore's terminology (p. ), Berkmüller structures it into two categories: concepts employed for the 'obvious'