the history of the trivium from classical antiquity 
to Herbert, the English poet. That thesis was the 
study of the impact of literacy on the shape of 
knowledge. And the trivium was philosophy or logic, 
grammar and rhetoric. Today they are represented 
in semiotics by semantics proper, which would be 
structure and philosophy of logic, and then, 
pragmatics would be the rhetorical side, and then 
syntactics would be the rhetorical side. There is a 
continuum of the trivium from classical antiquity 
to this day, taking different guises. But they were 
also the source of tremendous rivalries and 
quarrels between universities and various groups 
of intellectual societies. He was interested in these