Seven Liberal Arts

The four 'scientific' artes – music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (or astrology) – were known from the time of Boethius onwards as the *Quadrivium*. After the 9th century, the remaining three arts of the 'humanities' – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – were classed as well as the *Trivium*.^[5] It was in that two-fold form that the seven liberal arts were studied in the medieval Western university.^[7][8] During the Middle Ages, logic gradually came to take predominance over the other parts of the Trivium.^[9]

In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists and their Northern counterparts, despite in many respects continuing the traditions of the Middle Ages, reversed that process.^[10] Re-christening the old Trivium with a new and more ambitious name: Studia humanitatis, and also increasing its scope, they downplayed logic as opposed to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric, and added to them history, Greek, and moral philosophy (ethics), with a new emphasis on poetry as well.^[11] The educational curriculum of humanism spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth century and became the educational foundation for the schooling of European elites, the functionaries of political administration, the clergy of the various legally recognized churches, and the learned professions of law and medicine.^[12] The ideal of a liberal arts, or humanistic education grounded in classical languages and literature, persisted until the middle of the twentieth century.^[13]