QUADRIVIUM • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Quadrivium

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Quadrivium

noun

(Middle Ages) a higher division of the curriculum in a medieval university involving arithmetic and music and geometry and astronomy.

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Etymology of 'Quadrivium'

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"Quadrivium" Quotes from Famous Books

... formal school for poetical training during the best period of Provencal lyric. When, for instance, Giraut de Bornelli is said to have gone to "school" during the winter seasons, nothing more is meant than the pursuit of the trivium and quadrivium, the seven arts, which formed the usual subjects of instruction. A troubadour learned the principles of his art from other poets who were well acquainted with the conventions that had been formulated in course of time, conventions which were collected ...

— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor

... and those only in Latin translations. Here were the materials, slight enough, on which hung future development. The secular knowledge taught in the ordinary schools was that represented by the division of the Seven Arts into the elementary Trivium of Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, followed by the Quadrivium of Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy. The scope of the Trivium was much wider than the terms denote. Thus Grammar included the study of the classical Latin authors, which never entirely ceased; Rhetoric comprised the practice of composition in prose and ...

— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley

Words linked to "Quadrivium" : humanities, Dark Ages, liberal arts, Middle Ages, arts, humanistic discipline