BMCR 2009.01.45, John Henderson, The Medieval World of Isidore

John Henderson, The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville. Truth from
Words.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007.  Pp. xi, 232.
ISBN 978-0-521-86740-5.  $99.00.

Reviewed by Marco Formisano, Humboldt University and Columbia
University ([email protected])
Word count:  1960 words
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[The reviewer apologizes for the delay in submitting this text.]

When I first saw Henderson's (H.) book on Isidore I was working on a
project on ancient encyclopaedism and its transformations in early
modern culture. My attention was immediately caught by the fact that a
renowned Latinist, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, had taken the
trouble to write a monograph on a normally understudied author within
Latin studies, one seen as a source of imaginative etymologies and
fanciful information. The feeling of a challenge, which characterizes
the relation of reviewer and reviewed and which is similar to that of a
fencing match, is in this case sharpened by the abstruseness of H.'s
language. Those who are familiar with his other works know his style, a
style which tends to emphasize hidden assonances between words, to
create new terms, to subvert and unmask the common meaning to serve one
which supports his own ideas, and to reinstate the forgotten etymon.
And precisely this kind of preface seems to be a topos in other reviews
of H.'s works.

This demanding and continuous subversion and reconversion of language
makes the reading of H.'s book especially tough for foreign readers,
who sometimes might share feelings analogous to those of Jerome as he
flung Persius' work into the flames... While reading H. the reviewer
must resist the temptation to challenge him on his own linguistic
terrain, neglecting the standard scholarly language explicitly required
by the BMCR editors. Since in this case the reviewer has chosen to
write in his poor English, this will be, to the benefit of the readers,
not feasible. H.'s language and style are nearly impossible to
paraphrase, so in this review I will very often quote his words
directly. Particularly intriguing are his translations from the Latin
text, where the author seems to be an archaeologist of his own
language, (pseudo-)etymologizing words and searching for Latin roots.
As an example I shall here report H.'s translation of the famous
opening passage of the Etymologiae (words in italics are in bold in
H.'s text):[[1]]


DISCIPLINE + ART. Disciplearne got its name from learning: ergo it can
also be called science: you see, sci-earnce is short for psychal
learning, because none of us plies sciearnce without applied learning.
On another line disciplearne's the word because it does plenary
learning. The etymo-logy of Art is arid artillery, a combo of heartly 'ard
dictates (sc. rules). Others bespeak the word's importation from the
Greek '<a\ la arete>, i.e. 'from the complete article', the perfection
they dubbed science (1.1.1-2; p. 27).


I quote H. at length here, since the major issue is precisely the
language itself; that is, the Latin language, the language of Isidore
and, of course, H.'s own language. Which other Latin author could have
offered the chance to display H.'s continuous linguistic diffe/rance
than Isidore of Sevilla?

Here it is worth recalling that the Sevillan Bishop authored a wide
range of works before delivering at the end of his life in 636 his
masterpiece, which would come to represent the pillar of medieval
culture and of all future encyclopedias. Among those other writings,
particularly interesting are the differentiae, de differentiis rerum
and the synonimorum libri, all with a linguistic focus.

Isidore has been much neglected within classical studies and,
particularly in the Anglo-American scholarly context, he is considered
a topic which falls under medieval studies, as often happens for other
late antique authors as well. H. himself recognizes the problem, all
too briefly perhaps, when he argues that because of the age in which
Isidore lived (7th century Visigothic Spain), he "is virtually absent
from classical scholarship" (p. 5).[[2]] H. also reports Lindsay's
disqualifying opinion on the Etymologiae: "this encyclopedia is not a
literary work of art" (p. 7). H. (the co-author of "Classics. A very
short introduction") instead defines it as "a very grand introduction
to classics" (p. 9). This would have been a good opportunity to attempt
to explain the sense of studying such an author and to take a position
within the disciplinary discourse of the classics. One might wonder if
H. would ever suggest Isidore or similar authors to one of his students
as the subject for a doctoral thesis.

Considering the bibliography and the kind of close readings offered in
this book, it seems clear that H. wants to look at Isidore from the
perspective of classical Latin scholarship, and not so much from that
of the late antique or medieval Latin, in which obviously the
Etymologiae represent an authoritative text. Yet the title puts
emphasis precisely on Isidore's "medieval world." H.'s book represents,
nonetheless, the heritage of the best tradition of modern criticism on
literary languages, a tradition which tends to rehabilitate certain
texts normally not considered in their literary dimension. And these
texts may contain so sophisticated a language that they finally end up
becoming not only literature, but models for the renewal and subversion
of literary language. Exemplary in this case is Roland Barthes' Sade,
Fourier, Loyola (Paris 1971). Interesting methodological input to the
study of the Etymologiae is to be found in Umberto Eco's reflection on
dictionaries and encyclopaedias, in which he explains why the first has
to be superseded by the most recent. In an encyclopaedia, in fact, the
double distinction between natural language and model-language on the
one hand and between meta-language and language as object on the other
is no longer valid.[[3]]

H's brilliant work does not disappoint the reader, giving exactly what
the subtitle leads one expect: "Truth from Words". It would be
impossible to go through all the details of this close reading of
Isidore, so I will briefly comment on its structure. In his Preface H.
reminds us of the paradoxical nature of a reference work such as the
Etymologiae sive Origines: "This foundational encyclopaedia is also a
monument to efficient organization of data for purposes of
consultation. Book culture has made it possible to produce and use such
books without reading them." (p. x). H. divides his investigation in
two parts, the first called "Preliminaries," the second "Reading the
Etymologiae." In the first (p. 11-24, which is a revised version of a
contribution to J. Koenig and T. Whitmarsh (eds.), Ordering Knowledge
in the Roman Empire, Cambridge 2006, cf. BMCR 2008.10.39) H. tells the
story of the epistolary exchange between Isidore and his friend the
archdeacon Braulio of Zaragoza, who urged Isidore to complete his work
on etymologies. Braulio was an "interventionist reader" (p. 18), who
was responsible for dividing Isidore's encyclopaedia into 20 books.
Here H. states that in his sequential reading in the second part he
will not take into consideration the "perfunctory wind-down" of labels
and book division, since "only a reading open to telling narrative
self-transmutation can even contemplate strategy in any such
soul-opening trek from 1 through 20, front to back" (p. 23). H. will
resist "the peremptory intercession of the apparatus of headings, as so
many obstacles and deterrents to reading" and instead "[pay] them
respect only where they point up exegetic continuity, proportion, or
direction" (p. 24). In doing so he carries through on his promise to
show modern readers how to approach a reference work as literature,
presenting it as a "reflexive and processual narrative" which ends up
creating "an intelligible world to read" (p. xi).

In the second part (25-209) H. goes through all the themes present in
the Etymologiae dividing them into those falling into "primary
education" (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and "secondary education"
(from arithmetic to astronomy, from medicine to church history, from
geography to technology). This is the core of H's investigation, based
on the traditional knowledge system distinguishing between the trivium
and quadrivium which constitute liberal education. H. points out how
Isidore's text works and which logical system has been used to compose
it. This is a book on the "knowledge of knowledge" (p. 31), which
discusses "how to consider, infer, discuss, civilization, insofar as
its genesis is open to its own inspection" (p.34, which is also, after
all, the opinion of Curtius, quoted by H. at p. 6). At the basis of
this interpretive procedure is of course the alphabet of the Latin
language and its intrinsic analytical strength. Considering the concept
of grammar, Isidore tightly connects it to the alphabet, since "Grammar
got its name from letters, for the Greeks call letters grams" (p. 32).
This is an example of what H. defines as "characteristic of the Liberal
Education", i.e. "the Roman bilingual lesson in self-positioning
through cross-referencing Latin with/against Greek" in order to "direct
the novice to look within language for truth-production through
language" (p. 29).

Another point of interest is the way H. treats Book 6 of the
Etymologiae on "scripture and Christian duties" (p. 99-110). Here "the
Bible is itself a library, an archive, a history; and the history of
its writing is another, sacred, way to write the history of the chain
from Moses to Christendom" (p. 99). The Bible is presented by Isidore
as the history of writing the Old and the New Testament and as "a
multi-authored anthology of poetry, Psalms" (p. 100). And both the
Testaments present various complications in their making, since both
deal with apocryphal writings. The Bible becomes, in this sense, the
original library containing all human knowledge. This way of
considering book culture and the history of writing in its multiple
implications reflects recent trends within Latin studies. I recall here
the monograph by Antoinette Novara on Vitruvius which focuses on the
"Latin philosophy of the book".[[4]] The study of the archive in
particular has represented for at least fifteen years a major issue in
cultural studies (cf. the path-breaking works on "cultural memory" by
Jan and Aleida Assmann). This could have offered an interesting
perspective on the late antique world (I would say) of Isidore. And
more in general, a comparison with what we today erroneously call
"technical" writing could have also given an additional stimulus to
this close reading of the Etymologiae. As one example, under the
heading "Rhetoric," H. in his vivid translation speaks of "such a stock
pile, such a vast range, of material from the long line of gurus that
wonder comes easy to the reader, but grasp is out of the question,"
concluding: "Moral: keep conscious of textual materiality, keep
Etymologiae handy" (p. 43, n. 38). This is indeed atypical and the
strongest argument for presenting the book in terms of its immediate
utilitas, and is obviously meant to emphasize the author's role in this
procedure of shaping and transmitting knowledge.[[5]]

H.'s fascinating investigation unfortunately does not take into
consideration the scholarly debate on the origins of medieval
encyclopedism, in which Isidore's reception plays a major role,[[6]] or
on the general issue of the systematization of knowledge. For instance,
medieval and early modern "encyclopedias" could have offered very
interesting and pertinent parallels to this late antique work. Those
works may follow the same language-based criterion as Isidore, or they
may create new criteria in order to explicate the secret universal
harmony of knowledge.[[7]] A reference to the development of the
encyclopaedic genre could have been an occasion to contextualize the
Etymologiae within the long run of the history of knowledge in Europe,
showing its relevance and modernity, especially considering our
"contemporary logophilia and, in general, the graphematic turn" (p. 5).

Apart from these minor criticisms The Medieval World of Isidore of
Seville. Truth from Words not only offers an important contribution to
scholarship on Isidore, but shows how classicists can and should expand
the borders of Latin studies into new fields and methods. In the end,
the demanding reading more than rewards itself: it gives Latin scholars
the passing, intriguing illusion of being able to watch over an ancient
author's shoulder while he writes.


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Notes:


1.   DE DISCIPLINA ET ARTE: Disciplina a discendo nomen accepit: unde
et scientia dici potest. Nam scire dictum a discere, quia nemo nostrum
scit, nisi qui discit. Aliter dicta disciplina, quia discitur plena.
Ars uero dicta est, quod artis praeceptis regulisque consistat. Alii
dicunt a Graecis hoc tractum esse uocabulum <greek>a)po\ th=s
a)reth=s</greek>, id est a uirtute, quam scientiam uocauerunt.

2.   Registering his surprise, H. gives the topographically nearest
bibliographical reference, the famous Chuckle (for non-Cantabrigienses
this means The Cambridge History of Classical Literature).

3.   U. Eco, "L'antiporfirio", in Sugli specchi e altri saggi, Milan
1985, 334-361, see esp. 355-360 "L'enciclopedia come labirinto".

4.   Auctor in bibliotheca. Essai sur les texts prefaciales de Vitruve
et une philosophie latine du livre, Louvain 2005.

5.   In the field of ancient book culture and its Christian
transformation, including the change of material aspects, see A.
Grafton and M. Williams, Christianity and the transformation of the
book: Origen, Eusebius, and the library of Caesarea, Cambridge MA 2006.

6.   Cf. at least M. Picone (ed.), L'enciclopedismo medievale, Ravenna
1994; F. Eybl et al. (eds.), Enzyklopaedien in der Fruehen Neuzeit,
Tuebingen 1995; Ch. Meier (ed.), Die Enzyklopaedie im Wandel vom
Hochmittelalter bis zur fruehen Neuzeit, Muenchen 2002.

7.   Cf. for instance U. Dierse, Enzyklopaedie : Zur Geschichte eines
philosophischen und wissenschaftstheoretischen Begriffs, Bonn 1977; W.
Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica Universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte
humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft, Hamburg 1983; Th. Leinkauf,
Mundus combinatus. Studien zur Struktur der barocken
Universalwissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kirchers SJ, Berlin 1993.