seven liberal arts

seven liberal arts, a loose classification of the subjects comprising the educational curriculum in the West during the Middle Ages, from the late fifth century AD onwards. The name ‘liberal arts’ seems to originate with Aristotle who in the Politics talks of eleutherai epistēmai, ‘branches of knowledge worthy of free men’, the basic knowledge needed for a properly educated citizen. They were divided into the trivium, namely grammar (i.e. literature), rhetoric, and dialectic, and the more advanced quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. For the original nine see VARRO; see also CASSIODORUS and MARTIANUS CAPELLA.