62 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINa number of works attributed to and for a long time accepted as
being by him, whose authenticity has now been called in question or
even disproved. There is guidance as to the basic corpus of Isidoran
writings in the list drawn up by his friend and former pupil Braulio,
Bishop of Zaragoza (631-651), which, with a brief memoir on their
author, he appended to Isidore's own On Famous Men.^12 Braulio,
however, saw little of Isidore in the last two decades of the latter's
lifetime, as their mutual letters makes clear, and thus his knowledge
of Isidore's work may not have been comprehensive. So controversy
still exists concerning the authenticity of some minor works attrib-
uted to Isidore in their manuscript transmission, but not featuring in
Braulio's list.
The assured writings fall into a number of different categories.
There are historical writings such as the Chronicle, completed in 615/
6, and the History of the Goths, Vandals and Sueves, written in 625/6.
Both of these may have been royal commissions, and they put the
Visigothic kingdom into the scheme of the history of the world as it
was then conceived. The book On Famous Men was a continuation of
that of Jerome (d. 419) and Gennadius of Marseille (late fifth cen-
tury), and it concentrated principally on the writings of Mrican and
Spanish ecclesiastics of the fifth and sixth centuries. Their lives are
described hardly at all, but Isidore lists those of their books he had
read, and those of which he had heard but had not seen. A second
group of his writings comprise his aids to the study of scripture. In
this area he followed in the footsteps of such masters as Jerome and
Gregory the Great. These works were principally handbooks intended
for those who had to expound the scriptures in public or for monks,
for whom its regular study was an obligation, as, for example, laid
down in Isidore's own monastic rule. Some of these exegetical writ-
ings of Isidore's were devoted to the explanation of problematic pas-
sages in the Old and New Testaments, again for the same readership.
Isidore's scriptural knowledge and interest also lay at the heart of
much of his other writing that was not overtly exegetical. His book On
the Christian Faith, against the Jews is concerned with controverting
Jewish beliefs and arguments against Christianity, on the basis of
passages from the Old Testament used to show that the Jews were
confounded by the authority of their own scriptures. Likewise his On
the Order of Created Things is also dependent upon the Bible for the
substantiation of its arguments.
Isidore's most substantial work was his encyclopedic Etymologiae sive