Abstract
In the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern era, the formal structure of the seven disciplines of the Liberal Arts, inherited from late Roman antiquity, remained unchanged; nevertheless, it underwent substantial alterations in terms of the content. Especially with regard to the Trivium, which aimed to provide students with a full set of language skills, the Renaissance saw the attention of educators moving away from medieval manuals to the works of the ancient authors and a general rebalancing of the importance of the three subjects which made up the Trivium – grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric – in favor of grammar. The Renaissance Trivium was not intended merely to enable students to acquire the linguistic knowledge required to pass on to the study of theology, as in the Middle Ages, but became the main vehicle for educating the individual to virtue and action in the world.
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Salomoni, D. (2018). Trivium. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_686-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_686-1
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