Saint Isidore of Seville & Semantic Networks

Saint Isidore of Seville was the first Christian writer to compile for his co-coreligionists a summa of universal knowledge, in the form of his most important work, the Etymologiae with 448 chapters in 20 volumes.

The text was structured on the principle that the meaning of everything could be traced to the source of its name. These etymologies took the form of a series of "trees" (semantic networks in our contemporary parlance), rather like modern "branched learning" techniques, whereby from one one source, or word, the reader could follow the various extensions of what the root word implied, through all its "factual" meanings.