Sister Miriam Joseph Knihy

2014 Reprint of 1948 Third Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The "Trivium" is a systematic method of critical thinking for deriving certainty from any information coming into the mind via the five senses. In medieval universities, the Trivium comprised the three subjects that were taught first, specifically in this order: grammar, logic and rhetoric. While most textbooks are lucky to enjoy a shelf life of three or four years, "The Trivium" followed a different path. In 1947, when Columbia University Press published her celebrated dissertation, "Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language," Sister Miriam Joseph's previously published textbook gained wider notice. And since then, The "Trivium" continues to be rediscovered by new generations of writers and teachers. This dense, authoritative textbook takes all of Aristotle's teachings on logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and some of his teachings of poetics, adds some of the insights gained in the subsequent centuries, and presents it in a well-organized flow.

Grammar-school students in Shakespeare's time were taught to recognise the two hundred figures of speech that Renaissance scholars had derived from Latin and Greek sources (from amphibologia through onomatopoeia to zeugma). This knowledge was one element in their thorough grounding in the liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, known as the trivium. In Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language Sister Miriam Joseph writes: "The extraordinary power, vitality, and richness of Shakespeare's language are due in part to his genius, in part to the fact that the unsettled linguistic forms of his age promoted to an unusual degree the spirit of creativeness, and in part to the theory of composition then prevailing . . . The purpose of this study is to present to the modern reader the general theory of composition current in Shakespeare's England." The author then lays out those figures of speech in simple, understandable patterns and explains each one with examples from Shakespeare. Her analysis of his plays and poems illustrates that the Bard knew more about rhetoric than perhaps anyone else. Originally published in 1947, this book is a classic.

The Trivium guides the reader through a clarifying and rigorous account of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. A thorough presentation of general grammar, propositions, syllogisms, enthymemes, fallacies, poetics, figurative language, and metrical discourse--accompanied by lucid graphics and enlivened by examples from Shakespeare, Milton, Plato, and others-makes The Trivium a perfect book for teachers, students, writers, lawyers, and all serious users of language.