The Changing Relations between Grammar, Rhetoric and Music in the Early Modern Period

This paper aims to trace the changing architecture of the liberal arts in the seventeenth century, with primary focus on grammar and music. Both of these disciplines underwent radical internal developments over this period, and there are strong reasons for studying each strictly within its own boundaries. But there are also changes in the relations between the liberal arts which only emerge if one takes a broader perspective. This is most clearly manifest in the case of music, which undergoes a dramatic realignment from the quadrivium to the trivium over this period – from the artes reales (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) to the artes sermocinales (grammar, logic and rhetoric). ¹