Isidore of Seville as an Historian

Abstract

The fact that Isidore and his contemporaries in Visigothic Spain did not compose histories of significant length and detail has led many scholars to judge 6th- and 7th-century Spain as something of a historiographical wasteland. For example, E.A. Thompson stated that Isidore: “could hardly have told us less, except by not writing at all”. Walter Goffart described Isidore as “almost distinguished enough” as an historian to be included in his quartet of “narrators of barbarian history”. Despite these less-than-positive appraisals of Visigothic era historiography, the past was fundamental to how the people of Visigothic Spain understood their position in the world. Aside from works of history writing and hagiography, many of the documentary sources of the period, from the records of church councils to the efforts of kings to make and codify royal laws, were essentially backward-looking and involved the collation and reconfiguration of the knowledge of past times. Knowledge of the past had to be deployed so that it could be made useful in the present and future.