The art of reasoning consisted of various skills: speaking, reading and writing Latin, being able to speak in front of an audience, learning how to build sound arguments and develop the power to convince. How were these skills taught in the medieval classroom? Which texts were used and how did they form a coherent programme?
Books used in the classroom are witnesses to medieval processes of teaching and learning.
In class students studied seven liberal arts, those related to language (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and those related to the sciences (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).
The disciplines of rhetoric and dialectic were crucial to the art of reasoning.
Note The Art of Resoning in Medieval Manuscripts