Isidore’s natural cleverness made him remarkable. He wrote at least twenty-four books during his lifetime, which included historical chronicles, studies of natural scientific phenomena, mathematical textbooks, potted biographies of Church fathers, collections of epigrams, and his Etymologies, a giant encyclopedia in which he aimed to describe everything an educated person ought to know, ranging from the feeding habits of hedgehogs to the geographical arrangement of the world’s continents.11 (Not for nothing is Isidore today considered the patron saint of the internet.)
