Book Review – The Seven Liberal Arts, a Study in Mediaeval Culture by Paul Abelson

What a fascinating undertaking on the books and material used of classical education from their starting point to the Middle Ages. Published before the ease of computer database access en mass in 1972, this doctoral dissertation had to be an amazing undertaking in research. To be able to trace the literature of the seven subjects back from the time of the Greeks, through the Romans, through the early church histories, and into the middle ages I can’t even fathom the pouring over sources that had to happen.

Taking each of the seven subjects as their own section, Abelson gives a brief accounting of them and traces them throughout the periods described also with an introduction of where the trivium and the quadrivium were kind of first coined in their collected seven. What’s interesting is learning just how much the Greeks did for education and that we would think the Romans would have added a lot to it, but it seems the Romans tended to be more utilitarian in their gleanings of the Greeks. Christianity taking up the charge once paganism decreased and they happily utilized pagan “education” under the umbrella of common grace.

The longest section is the Latin/language/grammar section and just how much movement was made later where a person’s lectures would be written down and combined with another book to build the prevailing textbook. The section on math was also interesting in that it wasn’t that scholars hid what was known, it was that so little was known at the time that passing along the knowledge was easy and therefore doesn’t stand out in history. The movement of astronomy to be able to calculate Easter was pretty funny. Where math had a desert of resources until the Renaissance period, music was such a universal concept that there was abundant resources although “musician” wasn’t really a thing until the Renaissance as well but the study of music was drowning in resources.

I believe this work could use a great 3rd edition and combining with a resource list to see if one could track down copies of the works discussed would be a noble undertaking. I was quite impressed with how interesting this book was and one who was interested in classical education and the philosophy behind it would enjoy this work as I did.