ABSTRACT
Throughout the Middle Ages, with various shifts in emphasis, the liberal arts provided skills central in learning. Often in diverse texts we notice the arts bringing in connections to theology to affirm love as a condition or referee. The structure and content of learning to a fair degree indicates the preoccupations and goals of the culture. As suited the content, the form of the curriculum was conceptual and pragmatic, and whether in monastery, cathedral school or university it reflected the discipline and determination to access the meaning of all things by cogitatio. Pictorial and sculptural presentations of personifications and allegories were age-old devices to express the preoccupations of mind and spirit in things corporeal and material. The trivium and quadrivium, and philology, largely assumed the Word, the Spirit and Wisdom, which they could not subsume. The arts of the trivium are intimately connected. Hugh of St-Victor called them 'linguistic logic'.
