Date: February 4th, 2026 12:33 AM Author: Jared Baumeister
Etymologiae covers an encyclopedic range of topics. Etymology, the origins of words, is prominent, but the work also covers, among other things, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, music, astronomy, medicine, law, the church and heretical sects, pagan philosophers, languages, cities, humans, animals, the physical world, geography, public buildings, roads, metals, rocks, agriculture, war, ships, clothes, food, and tools.
Etymologiae was a widely used textbook throughout the Middle Ages. It was so popular that it was read in place of many of the original classics that it summarized; as a result, some of these ceased to be copied and were lost. It was cited by Dante Alighieri (who placed Isidore in his Paradiso), quoted by Geoffrey Chaucer, and mentioned by the poets Boccaccio, Petrarch, and John Gower. Among the thousand-odd surviving manuscript copies is the 13th-century Codex Gigas; the earliest surviving manuscript preserves a fragment of book XI from the 7th century.[1] Etymologiae was printed in at least ten editions between 1472 and 1530, after which its importance faded during the Renaissance. The first scholarly edition was printed in Madrid in 1599; the first modern critical edition was edited by Wallace Lindsay in 1911.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae
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