The Trivium in the 12Th Century

Chapter 7 The Trivium in the 12th Century

Frédéric Goubier and Irène Rosier-Catach

1 Introduction

In the early 12th century there was no lack of praise for the liberal arts as pathways to acquire wisdom. As we read in Thierry of Chartres’s prologue to the Heptateuchon:1

The two main instruments of philosophical work are understanding (in- tellectus) and its expression in language (interpretatio).The quadrivium illuminates comprehension, and the trivium enables the elegant, ratio- nal, and beautiful expression of comprehension. Thus it is clear that the Heptateuchon constitutes a single, unified instrument for all philosophy. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, and wisdom is the integral comprehension of the truth of existing things, which no one can attain even in part unless he has loved wisdom.

The division of knowledge into seven liberal arts was transmitted in the Middle Ages by the encyclopaedists of Late Antiquity: Martianus Capella (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii,2 ca. 430 or ca. 470 ?), Cassiodorus (Institutiones,3 ca. 620), Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae,4 ca. 625), and then by the authors of the early Middle Ages. The designation liberales appended to artes received various justifications, as one can read in several early 12th-century witnesses: the arts are liberal because they “liberate” the students from sin, in that they prevent their minds from wandering toward perverted behaviour, noted a grammarian named Stephen, or “because they free students from secular worries,” states

1 Édouard Jeauneau, “Le Prologus in Eptatheucon de Thierry de Chartres,” Medieval Studies 16 (1954), 171–175, repr. in Id., Lectio philosophorum: Recherches sur l’École de Chartres (Amster- dam: 1973); Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (Oxford: 2009). 2 Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ed. James Willis, Martianus Capella (Leipzig: 1983). 3 Cassiodorus, Institutiones, ed. Roger A.B. Mynors (Oxford: 1961), Chap. 2, 562. 4 Isidorus Hispalensis, Etymologiae Isidorus Hispalensis, Etymologiarum siue originum libri XX, ed. Wallace Martin (Oxford: 1911/1982).

142 Goubier and Rosier-Catach the preface of a commentary on Priscian, the Glosulae super Priscianum.5 As John of Salisbury explains, the liberal arts are called “liberal either because the Ancients were mindful that their children (liberi) should be instructed in them, or because they aimed to liberate men so that, free of worries, they may have the leisure to devote themselves to wisdom … They often ward off material worries, so that the activity of the mind can more easily gain access to philosophy”.6 The septenary of the liberal arts, trivium (grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music), is often men- tioned in introductory literature, or circulates in magnificent manuscripts that have no scholastic use. Such is the case of the luxurious manuscript of the Heptateuchon that Thierry gave to his chapter.7 The prefaces give fairly stan- dard indications of the distribution of tasks within the trivium.8 Sometimes, the three disciplines are presented as having increasing degrees of comprehen- siveness: “Grammar only requires that the words be linked in the utterance. Dialectics requires also that the meaning be complete. Rhetoric requires, along with these two aspects, a third one, namely ornament. Rhetoric thus deals with three aspects, dialectics with two, and grammar with only one, making the lat- ter two simpler” (Grammar circa hanc artem, ms. Cambridge St. John’s College 12, fol. 52vb9). Sometimes, however, it is grammar which occupies the domi- nant position, as explained in the preface of one of the versions of the Glosu- lae: “one must first know how to build one case with another correctly, a noun with another, a verb with a noun, before taking interest in the ornamentation of words or in truth and falsehood”.10 This classification of the arts is not the only one possible. Thus, Hugh of Saint-Victor substitutes it with a more extensive division of philosophy, in four

5 Karin Margareta Fredborg, “The unity of the trivium,” in Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter, ed. Sten Ebbesen (Tübingen: 1995), 325–338, here 325. 6 Iohannes Saresberiensis, Metalogicon, ed. John Barrie Hall, Katharine Stephanie Bene- dicta Keats-Rohan (aux.), Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 98 (Turnhout: 1991), i, 12. 7 Gillian Evans, “The uncompleted Heptateuch of Thierry of Chartres,” History of Universi- ties 3 (1983), 1–13; Fredborg, “The unity of the trivium,” 327–328; Jeauneau, “Le Prologus in Eptatheucon.” 8 Yukio Iwakuma, “The Division of Philosophy and the Place of the Trivium from the 9th to the Mid-12th Centuries,” in Medieval Analyses in Language and Cognition, ed. Sten Ebbesen, Russell L. Friedman (Copenhagen: 1999), 165–189. 9 Cited by Fredborg, “The unity of the trivium,” 335. 10 Margaret T. Gibson, “The Early Scholastic Glosule to Priscian, Institutiones Grammaticae: the Text and its Influence,” in Studi Medievali, serie terza: 20/1 (1979), 235–254, here 252– 253, repr. in Ead., Artes and Bible in the Medieval West (Aldershot: 1993).