Isidore of Seville is an exceptional witness with respect to analysing the purpose of historia production in late Antiquity. He wrote a Chronicon and stories of the Germanic peoples settled in Spain. In his Etymologies , he defined the various genres of writing historia about the past in service of his cultural project. Finally, there are many references to historia in the De ecclesiasticis officiis , the Liber differentiarum , the De natura rerum , the De fide catholica contra Iudaeos , and the Sententiae .

We can distinguish three different aspects from the Bishop of Seville’s works, which mention uses of the term historia more than one hundred times. The first aspect is the definition of historia as a literary genre based on classical standards. The second is an exegetical reflection on the plural readings of the historia of a biblical text. The third aspect concerns the specific usages that Isidore discerns from the data provided by historia , whether sacred or profane, in order to produce texts aimed at describing the etymologies of words or the human past.

Explicit definitions of historia as a literary genre

Definitions of historia as a literary genre are mainly found in the Etymologies , in particular in chapters 41 (De historia ) and 44 (De generibus historiae ) of book I. They include various classical data that coexist but that are not always harmonised.