ABSTRACT
At the opening of the ninth century the scholarly study of the natural world was very much in transition. While we may find references to nature and to the wonders of nature in a variety of both secular and ecclesiastical writings, the subject of nature as such, or its components, was quite circumscribed. Although the program of seven liberal arts was developed in late Antiquity and was set forth by Boethius, Cassiodorus, and others, the seventh and eighth centuries were a period during which this program seems to have disintegrated, to be reconstituted with new emphases in the late eighth and ninth centuries. Among the liberal arts the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmony had neither substance nor meaningful recognition in the actual studies of scholars and monks between the time of Isidore of Seville and that of Alcuin of York. Isidore's Etymologies included in Books I—III a summary of the liberal arts, with the quadrivium encompassed in Book III, but the influence of this part of the work over the following century or more is not apparent. On the contrary, if we look for studies of nature we find them comprehended by the cosmological tracts On the Nature of Things (pre-eminently that by Isidore) and on computus.
