April 4 is the feast of St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), bishop of Seville and Doctor of the Church. Born at Cartagena, in Spain, to a Hispano-Roman family, he succeeded his brother Leander as bishop of Seville in 600. His Etymologiae — an encyclopaedia of all knowledge in twenty books, arranged by the etymologies of words — became the standard textbook of the early Middle Ages, and was the most copied book in the West for four centuries.
Isidore presided over the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, which set the structure of the Spanish Church and decreed that every diocese should have a cathedral school — a decree that gave Spain the most literate clergy of the early medieval West. He died at Seville in 636 and was buried in the church of San Isidoro, which became one of the great pilgrimage churches of medieval Spain. The relics were translated to Leon in 1063, to the Basilica of San Isidoro, where they lie in a silver reliquary.
Isidore was proclaimed Doctor of the Church in 1722 and named patron of the Internet by Pope John Paul II in 1999 — a recognition of the Etymologiae as the first encyclopaedia. From Seville, where he was bishop, to the basilica of San Isidoro at Leon, where he is buried, the April 4 feast is the feast of the last of the Latin fathers.
