Humanities courses have been integral to the university system since the very early days of its inception in Western Europe over 1,000 years ago. During the reign of Charlemagne in France in the eighth century, higher education consisted of cathedral schools or palace schools designed to educate young members of the clergy or ruling class. Charlemagne instituted a change to the curriculum of those schools — designed to educate students in either theology or military tactics — to include the liberal arts.2
The liberal arts consisted of the Trivium and Quadrivium arts. The Trivium arts focused on language through grammar, rhetoric and dialectic (logic), and the Quadrivium arts included music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. While these topics of study differ in some cases from how we understand and teach them now, the Trivium arts represent early areas of study we now know as the humanities. These fields of study, focusing on language, communication and interpretation, were the roots of what would become known as the humanities and were integral to the foundations of the growing university system.1
The Growth of University-Level Education
The roots of the university system put in place by Charlemagne in the eighth century evolved by the 12th century in Italy, France, England, Germany and other European countries that educated local populations and attracted foreign students seeking a higher education.2 These early universities were referred to as studia generalia and often had to receive the blessing of the Pope to be able to award degrees to students. The term for these places evolved to universitas, referring to a community, corporation or guild.3
These places of learning did teach young future clergy members, but also increasingly taught middle-class students in secular fields like medicine and law. In places like the University of Paris, young students were taught the four faculties: theology, cannon law, medicine and art. The degrees of bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate were also established during this period in the Middle Ages.4
The Inspiration
The humanities, as a field, was inspired by the rise of humanism during the Renaissance by secular educators and scholars in the 14th and 15th centuries. The study of the human experience was central to humanism, and educators focused on works of art and other forms of expression to understand our desires, capabilities and form.5
Humanism studies, or studia humanitas, focused on the study of grammar, poetry, ethics and ancient Greco and Roman literature. Along with what we now think of as degrees in the hard sciences like medicine and physics, humanities programs stressed the study of the self through philosophical inquiry and the arts. The knowledge of the self, from a secular lens, was central in the liberal arts university programs during the Renaissance period.6
Two Essential Fields
Although we presently tend to think of the sciences and humanities as being radically different and, at times incompatible, the two fields were essential to what became a university education going back to the Trivium and Quadrivium structure of a liberal arts education. The split between the sciences and humanities, as we commonly understand it today, occurred late in the 19th century when German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey distinguished the natural sciences from the human sciences, or the humanities and social sciences.
While the natural sciences focused on understanding the world through quantifiable, measurable data, he proffered that the humanities sought to understand our existence through creative expression.7 He also argued that the human science fields sought to understand how social structures shaped societies and influenced individuals throughout history.8
By analyzing the expressions and experiences of individuals and societies in literature, art or history, humanities scholars use critical-thinking skills to understand the importance of social structural context and the weight of human emotion in art. The focus on communication, critical thinking, contextualization, creativity and knowledge of various cultures throughout history, and the impact of historical societies on the present day, are important for the humanities as a field, but they are also increasingly important for fields in the sciences like business and medicine.9
