5 - Quadrivial pursuits

Summary

That there was a general reorganization of education and its disciplinary divisions from the late Middle Ages into the period we now call the ‘Renaissance’ has long been a historiographical commonplace, although the precise nature of the changes varied from place to place. In the Italian universities, for example, the artes liberates of trivium and quadrivium became a sort of propaedeutic to the advanced university faculties of law and medicine, while in Paris the faculties of arts, medicine and theology remained distinct. Then, too, if these did not give way to the stadia humanitatis of the humanist educational system - grammar, eloquence, poetry, history and moral philosophy - yet they did find themselves increasingly in competition with and affected by humanist schools and colleges from early in the sixteenth century (no doubt starting with Sturm in Strasbourg, and then reaching a peak on the Continent with the spread of the Jesuit colleges).

The situation of mathematical, logical and musical studies in schooling, as much in the Middle Ages as in the Renaissance, is for the most part rather unclear, although they did play a greater or lesser role after the stadia humanitatis course (even if most advances happened, we have seen, outside the schools). What I wish to address is surely connected to these shifts, but should not be confused with them. Music was thus centrally important in the old quadrivium.