The liberal arts in medieval education

Medieval universities gave institutional form to a hierarchical notion of knowledge which they inherited from antiquity. Both Plato (Republic II, III, VII) and Aristotle (Politics VII, VIII) described a basic education which comprised a grounding in elementary grammar, literature, music, and arithmetic, and which prepared the way for the advanced study of mathematics and finally philosophy, whose object was wisdom, the supreme end of knowledge. That view of the propaedeutic role of the ‘liberal arts’, as they were called, arts for the free, as opposed to the servile, man passed into Roman education, where they had the directly practical end of preparing for a training in law and public life. It was in turn inherited by the Middle Ages and adapted, above all by Saint Augustine, to Christian objects of mastering the meaning of Scripture as the repository of Christian wisdom founded upon faith and the love of God. By the time of the emergence of universities in the twelfth century, theology, as the end of profane knowledge, had been joined by the more practical ends of law and medicine.

The arts were therefore distinguished from the higher subjects in a number of important ways. In the first place they were a heterogeneous grouping without any unity other than their common introductory function. From antiquity they were divided between the three verbal disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium or threefold way to wisdom), and the four mathematical disciplines, of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the quadrivium or fourfold way).