Published in New Approaches in the Research on the Crown of Aragon

Keywords: Analogical Thinking, liberal arts, Medieval Science, Medieval Sermon, Saint Vincent Ferrer.

This article contains an exposition and an analysis on the theme of the Liberal Arts in a sermon of Saint Vincent Ferrer, renowned Dominican Valencian preacher during the passage between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We intend to show that the Liberal Arts are addressed by the sermonist within the traditional theoretical scope of classification of sciences in the medieval period, as branches of knowledge for the service of the higher science, Theology, to avail the scholastic dictum philosophia ancilla theologiae. In his exposition, the author follows the medieval didactic principles of analogical thinking, the figurative hermeneutics and the allegorical exegesis of the Bible, by which he ensnares the meanings and properties of each science or Liberal Art, namely Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric, the Trivium sciences, and Music, Arithmetic, Geometry and Astrology, Quadrivium sciences, in a web of metaphorical and analogical relations aimed, at the end, to confer spiritual, religious and moral meaning and utility to each of them, as well as subordinate them to the royal domain of the sapientia christiana.