The mediaeval university curriculum known as the trivium (the "three roads", Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) was perhaps the first Western formulation of an educational product, designed to instill the elements of language, analysis, & communication. It seems to have been effective and, in the humanities at least, it can seem that we have simply been changing the balance of the package ever since. I have borrowed its three-part structure as a ready-made scaffolding for this book.
Most students eventually discover that study can be a dry diet, and badly in need of a little juice. As Mephistopheles puts it to a disillusioned Faust, "All theory is grey, and green alone the golden tree of life" (or, as a colleague of the deceased notes admiringly in Browning's poem A Grammarian's Funeral, "This man decided not to Live but Know"). The grammar and logic of those two quotations are questionable, but their rhetorical intent is clear.
That elusive green, golden tree makes many appearances in these images.
