Approaching the ancient library

That definition of bibliotheca – the most common Latin term for library – is taken from the Etymologies of Isidore, Bishop of Seville, a ‘vastly important conduit for classical antiquity into the medieval world’.2 Composed in the first decades of the seventh century AD, by which time most of the Iberian peninsula had been part of the Visigothic kingdom for nearly two centuries, the Etymologies themselves were both the last Latin encyclopaedic work of antiquity and one of the foundations of mediaeval scholarship. Like the Natural History of Pliny the Elder and Solinus’ Collection of Memorable Things, Isidore’s compendium preserved and passed on a small part of Greek andRomanknowledge, once thegreat libraries of antiquitywere gone. Unlike them, the fruits of Isidore’smiscellenistic researchwere subordinated to a thoroughly Christian reordering of knowledge. The research from which this book derives was conducted as part of a project sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust on Science and Empire in the Roman World. One of the objectives of that project was to examine the institutional and intellectual frameworks of knowledge production under the Empire, and the means by which that knowledge was organised and transmitted through space and time. A companion volume on pre-modern encyclopaedisms considers grand projects of synthesis and organisation at the level of the book.3 This volume considers the corresponding physical institution, the ancient library. As the example of Isidore shows, these discussions are in practice closely interwoven.4 Isidore offers us not only a definition of library – if one which we will need to refine – but also the only history of libraries that has survived