Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636) was a Visigothic-era bishop, scholar, and the last of the great Latin Church Fathers of the West. Succeeding his brother Leander as bishop of Seville around 600, he presided over the Fourth Council of Toledo (633) and worked to consolidate the Catholic Church in the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania after the conversion of the Arian Goths. He is best known for the Etymologiae, a sprawling encyclopedia that compressed the surviving knowledge of the ancient world into twenty books and served as a standard reference text throughout the Middle Ages. Canonized and later (1722) declared a Doctor of the Church, he survives in the corpus as a correspondent in the letters of Braulio of Zaragoza and the Visigothic letter collection (Epistulae Wisigothicae).