The start of a new university semester means many things: reconnecting with friends, working out a class schedule (including when to get in a snooze), and, of course, the last-minute dash to the campus bookstore to track down back-ordered textbooks for the first week’s reading. Student life probably looked a lot different in the Middle Ages—although there were likely still some naps—but then as now, textbooks played an important part in college education. One of the most important such manuals in 15th-century England was Tria sunt, whose title was given to it by medieval users and taken from its opening words: “The crafting of any work is concerned with three things: namely, the beginning, the development, and the end.” Most likely written around 1400 by a Benedictine monk preparing pupils for study at Oxford University, the text is now available with English facing the Latin for the first time in a new volume from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, translated by Professor Martin Camargo of the University of Illinois (Harvard University Press, 2019).
