Study the tradition
The Learning Library The texts, courses, and commentaries the Institute has gathered, shelved by subject and by format, and joined to the timeline and the Atlas. Search reaches everything a card says, and the chips narrow the shelf by format and by subject. A card opens on its doors: a course to begin, a lab, a place on the timeline or the Atlas, or the text itself where it lives; a gallery’s card opens the gallery.
Format All Course Study Guide Primary Source Timeline Gallery Podcast Teaching Tool Book Atlas
Subject All Quadrivium Trivium Arithmetic Art Astronomy Geometry History Literature Logic Music Philosophy Politics Rhetoric Theology
Timelines and galleries
Read chronologically, or look at what the tradition made of itself in pictures.
Timeline The Arts of Liberty Timeline Arts of Liberty The five published Arts of Liberty timelines — the liberal arts, Greece, Rome, Augustine, and the epic tradition — combined into one chronological sequence you can search, filter, and take a layer at a time.
Open the timeline → Gallery Liberal Arts Gallery Various artists The seven arts personified, ordered, taught, and — in one etching — driven out of a city by Pluto and Bacchus. The tradition picturing its own curriculum.
Open the collection → Gallery Virtues Gallery Pesellino · Raphael · Pollaiolo and Botticelli Prudence with her mirror, Justice with her scales, Charity crowned above the rest: three works that give each virtue an emblem you can tell her by.
Open the collection → Gallery Temperaments Gallery Le Brun · Die Gartenlaube · Tierpark Berlin The four temperaments Hippocrates left behind, read from how four men behave at a game of cards — and carved as four children on their four elements.
Open the collection → Gallery The School of Athens Raphael Raphael's fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura, figure by figure: the four quadrivial groups in the foreground, the four stages of learning around Euclid, and the stairs that carry the eye up to Plato and Aristotle.
Explore the fresco → Course Apology Plato
Philosophy · 45 min Apology The speech Socrates gave for his life, in two readings, a question of your own, and a seminar prepared: the course the rest of the Studium is patterned on.
View resource → Course On Duties Cicero
Philosophy · 50 min On Duties Cicero's last book, written to his son as the republic failed: can the useful ever truly part from the right?
View resource → Course Founding Documents The American Founders
Politics · 60 min Founding Documents Read the Declaration, the Articles, the Constitution, and The Federalist in the order they were written, and ask who the party to each compact is.
Connected to Rhetoric · Logic View resource → Course The Confessions St. Augustine
Theology · 55 min The Confessions Augustine tells God the story of his own life — the stolen pears, the wasted years, the garden in Milan — and finds one restlessness under all of it.
View resource → Course The Tempest William Shakespeare
Literature · 50 min The Tempest Shakespeare's last solo play: a wronged magician gets every enemy into his power, and the question becomes what he will do with them.
View resource → Course The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri
Literature · 60 min The Divine Comedy A hundred cantos in which a man lost at thirty-five is walked down through hell, up a mountain, and out past the stars — and every sin and every virtue on the way turns out to be a love.
Connected to Grammar · Rhetoric View resource → Study Guide Study Guide on Augustine’s Confessions The Boethius Institute
Theology · 4 pages Study Guide on Augustine’s Confessions Outline, questions, and important passages, in two parts — Books I–IX, then Books X–XIII. The document behind the Studium's Confessions course.
In preparation — not yet carried in the Studium View resource → Study Guide Study Guide on Shakespeare’s The Tempest The Boethius Institute
Literature · 3 pages Study Guide on Shakespeare’s The Tempest Outline, questions, and important passages on Prospero's project, his rule of the island, and why he breaks his staff. The document behind the Studium's Tempest course.
In preparation — not yet carried in the Studium View resource → Course Introductory Logic Arts of Liberty
Logic · 12 lessons Introductory Logic Twelve lessons from term to syllogism — logic taught as the mind's own discipline, the way the trivium taught it.
In preparation — not yet carried in the Studium View resource → Teaching Tool Rhetorical Analysis Arts of Liberty
Rhetoric · 25 min Rhetorical Analysis A worksheet for taking a speech apart: what it wants, how it moves, and where it works on you.
In preparation — not yet carried in the Studium View resource → Atlas The Tradition Atlas Arts of Liberty
History · 20 min The Tradition Atlas The people, works, and questions from Pythagoras's string to this Studium, and the connections between them — the tradition drawn as a map rather than a line.
View resource → Podcast Mathematics in Plato’s Republic The Examining Life
Quadrivium · 42 min Mathematics in Plato’s Republic On the Republic's strange demand that philosophers first spend years with number and figure — and what Plato thought it did to a mind.
In preparation — not yet carried in the Studium View resource → Primary Source Euclid’s Elements Euclid
Geometry · Open text Euclid’s Elements Move from definitions and postulates through constructions whose truth can be seen and demonstrated.
Connected to Geometry View resource → Teaching Tool Figured number Arts of Liberty Studium
Arithmetic · 10 min Figured number Draw the rows out one at a time and watch the triangular numbers appear — number taking a shape, which is what the ancients meant by figured number.
Connected to Arithmetic View resource → Teaching Tool The equilateral triangle Arts of Liberty Studium
Geometry · 15 min The equilateral triangle Euclid I.1 built a step at a time, with a notebook that asks for the reason each side must be equal rather than accepting that it looks so.
Connected to Geometry View resource → Teaching Tool Ratio made audible Arts of Liberty Studium
Music · 10 min Ratio made audible Two string lengths, one relation. Choose 2:1, 3:2, or 4:3, sound them together, and hear the proportion the ear obeys before reason has named it.
Connected to Music View resource → Teaching Tool Model against appearance Arts of Liberty Studium
Astronomy · 12 min Model against appearance Put Mars through a geocentric model and then a heliocentric one, and ask what each saves of the appearances — the question fourteen centuries turned on.
Connected to Astronomy View resource → Book A Brief Quadrivium Peter Ulrickson
Quadrivium · Reference A Brief Quadrivium A short modern coursebook: the four arts taught from first principles, sized for a teacher's first year with them.
Connected to All four arts In preparation — not yet carried in the Studium View resource → Book Boethian Number Theory Boethius · trans. Michael Masi
Arithmetic · Extended study Boethian Number Theory Masi's translation of the De arithmetica — the textbook that carried Greek number theory to the medieval schools, from the man who named the quadrivium.
Connected to Arithmetic · Music In preparation — not yet carried in the Studium View resource → Book Forces and Fields Mary B. Hesse
Astronomy · Extended study Forces and Fields Hesse's history of action at a distance — how forces and fields have been imagined, disputed, and reformed — read here for what changing models did to the idea of explanation.
Connected to Astronomy In preparation — not yet carried in the Studium View resource →