CHAPTER 15 MARTIANUS CAPELLA AND THE LIBERAL ARTS ANDREW HICKS Gram loquitur; Dia vera docet; Rhet verba colo rat; Mus canit; Ar numerat; Ge ponderat; Ast colit astra. [Gram(mar) speaks; Dia(lectic) teaches truth; Rhet(oric) colors words; Mus(ic) sings; Ar(ithmetic) counts; Ge( ometry) weighs; Ast(ronomy) cultivates the stars.] So goes one schoolboy's mnemonic for the seven liberal arts, here neatly divided between hexameters into the three verbal arts of the trivium and the four mathe- matical disciplines of the quadrivium. The quaint simplicity of a mnemonic, how- ever, deliberately belies the complexities and tensions within the long-standing tradition of the artes liberales. Adumbrated in countless encyclopedias, handbooks, and treatises that detail the content of and epistemological approaches to the vari- ous disciplines, the liberal arts were an all-pervasive presence, ever differently real- ized in disciplinary configurations and institutional programs. The various schemata of the seven disciplines have been dismissed as (for instance) a "scholastic detail, a notice transmitted from one author to another, which each may contaminate or modify from his own point of view, yet without any correspondence to real-life teaching" (Diaz y Diaz 1969, 46). But the system of the liberal arts was more than a seven-part schema; it established itself as a dynamic discursive apparatus and peda- gogical paradigm that shifted continuously to accommodate different cultural con- texts and philosophical viewpoints. A comprehensive history of the liberal arts, however, would quickly become a Borgesian map, a representational surface as broad and expansive as the cultural, literary, and philosophical terrain it overlays (see, for instance, the nearly one hundred contributions to Arts liberaux et philoso- phie au Moyen Age 1969). It is, perhaps, an impossibility.