Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts (Records of Western Civilization Series)

Magnificent translation of one of the great classics of the Western humanities and Liberal Arts tradition!

Very pleased.

I have heard several times that the Marriage of Philology and Mercury is hard to read in the Latin. Furthermore, I have found no rich veins of intellectual history in it. But it is an important and widely read Latin work that epitomizes in a simple way the disciplines of Grammar, Dialectic (=logic), Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Harmony. Apparently the famous curriculum of the Seven Liberal Arts was made canonical by this work. We are lucky that a scholar of Stahl's powers chose to translate and comment on this work; Stahl was the leading scholar of Roman intellectual history, and the footnotes to the translation helpfully show connections to various lesser known works, like the Logic of Apuleius.I care about the history of mathematics and logic, and thus was interested in the quadrivium speeches and the speech of Dialectic, which covers material from Aristotle's Categories, a little from On Interpretation, and some more from Prior Analytics. Much of Book VI, the speech of Geometry, is about physical geography, because of the etymology of the word geometry. I was surprised that in Book VII, the speech of Arithmetic, Martianus describes the Euclidean algorithm (in section 785); he does not prove it but even describing it is a much higher level than the rest of Book VII. Because there are good cross references, it is probably best to scan the book for particular topics to see how Martianus explains them, e.g. how a later Latin writer understood syllogisms or the five predicables (genus, species, difference, property, accident).Stahl also translated Macrobius,  Commentary on the Dream of Scipio by Macrobius (Records of Western Civilization Series) (Records of Western Civilization (Paperback)) . The commentary by Stahl, Johnson and Burge is a separate volume,  Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts: The Quadrivium of Martianus Capella, Latin Trad. (Records of Western Civilization Series) .

Unfortunately This book didn't ever turn up to me in the post. But the seller (Books Etc in Fleet) very kindly refunded the full price. Hopefully it will eventually turn up to me or him so that he won't lose out. A friend has since lent me a copy and it is very good indeed for those who are interested in this sort of material. It helps to explain the why the 12th century churchmen associated the Seven Liberal Arts with the seven planetary spheres whereby learning involved an ascent of the soul.

impeccable