7vium

The title of this blog pays tribute to the medieval Trivium+Quadrivium.

In the early Middle Ages, monastic and cathedral schools, only depositaries of knowledge of the epoch, turned to compile and organize all the known human knowledge in a comprehensive encyclopedic corps.

This compendium derived, in the late eighth century, in the Trivium et Quadrivium, which were adopted as the educational curriculum by Alcuin of York for the Palace School at Aachen, and soon spread throughout western Europe.

In it, the liberal arts, classified into seven branches, were divided into two groups:

- Trivium (Latin: three-ways), which grouped together the disciplines of eloquence: Grammar (lingua, "tongue"), Dialectic/Logic (ratio,  the "why") and Rhetoric (tropus, "figures").

- Quadrivium ("four roads"), including related disciplines of Mathematics: Arithmetic (numerus, "the numbers"), Geometry (angulus, "Angles"), Astronomy (astra, "the stars") and Music (tonus, "edges").

Out of this classification of the liberal arts, understood as 'art' or academic disciplines, which were trades or professions held by free men, we could find those arts classified as 'servile', vile and mechanical tasks played by servants or slaves.

Thus, the privileged classes were devoted to intellectual work, applied to the study of the Trivium and Quadrivium, while the popular classes developed crafts.

The scope and extent of this classification certainly evolved over time, but this design did not suffer significant innovations till the next era of intellectual transformations, called Renaissance, and especially till the age of Enlightenment.

Despite this, we still talk of  'liberal professions' in reference to those related to law, economics, medicine or journalism, for example.

Once this exposure, and given my interest to focus on the spreading of news and resources related to the so-called 'Science', without neglecting the other fields of knowledge and human creation that merit divulgation, I thought it was appropriate to pay tribute to that set of subjects that constitute the functional backbone of our existence, titling this blog as 7vium (3vium+4vium).

Hope this mutual journey will be interesting both for me and for you, and that we'll have fun together with the proposed themes.