Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville (circa 560 to 4 April 636) served as Archbishop of Seville for over thirty years and is widely regarded as the last scholar of the ancient world. He was instrumental in converting Visigothic kings from Arianism to Catholicism and presided over church councils including the Second and Third Councils of Seville. At the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, which he helped shape, he contributed canons addressing the treatment of Jewish and crypto-practicing families and mandated that every diocese establish a cathedral seminary teaching Greek, Hebrew and the liberal arts. His most influential work, the twenty-book encyclopedic Etymologiae, preserved and organized a vast body of inherited classical and legal knowledge that later medieval scholarship, including canon law compilation, drew upon directly.