ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, ( ?-636).
Archbishop of Seville. and one of the most dis tinguished ecclesiastics of the seventh century. Ile was horn about 51;0 (or 570), probably at or near Cartagena, where his father. Severianus, had been prefect. Two of his brothers, Fulgen tins and I A'ander. Were, like himself, bishops, the first of Cartagena. the second of Seville; Isidore succeeded the latter in 600. The episcopate of Isidore is rendered notable by the two half ecclesiastical, half-civil councils of Seville in 619 and of Toledo in 633. which were held under his presidency, and the canons of which may almost be said to have formed the basis of the consti tutional law of the Spanish kingdoms, both for Church and for State, down to the great consti tutional changes of the fifteenth century. The de crees of councils and other Church laws anterior to his time. vaned by his panic, are not from his hand. He died at Seville, April 4, (136.
'Isidore was the most learned man of his time, and his works are in the most various depart ments of knowledge—theological, aseetioal, seriptural. historical. philosophical. and even philological. The most complete edition is that of Arevaio (7 vols., Rome, 1797-1803), re printed with addition of the canons and liturgy in Potrologia Latina, lxxxi.-1xxxvi. We are indebted to Isidore for many fragments of Greek and Latin authors. among the number several of whom hardly any other remains have been preserved. In 1722 Benedict XIV. made him one of the doctors of the Church. His Sentences from Augustine and Gregory the Great suggested Peter Lombard's RentraccR, and his Et ymologirs, in twenty books (edited by Otto. Leipzig, 1833), was the great medieval eneyelop:rdia.