Heretical catholics and catholic heretics: Isidore of Seville and the religious history of the Goths

This paper examines the various redactions of Isidore of Seville’s Historia Gothorum, Wandalorum et Sueborum, and his other main historical work, the Chronica, suggesting that his depiction of the Goths’ religious past was intimately tied up with present political and religious conditions as well as his own personal interests. This dictated that he rewrite significant portions of the history of the Goths in order to underplay, ignore or explain away certain uncomfortable facts, especially their 200-year-long foray into Arianism, while emphasising other episodes in order to gain maximum rhetorical capital. However, not only did he reconstitute the religious history of the Goths, but he focussed on and reinterpreted identical categories in his presentation of the religious histories of the Roman Emperors, and Vandal kings, so that wherever possible they could be contrasted negatively with the Goths.