Evidence for the history of education in the long twelfth century has largely been found in the writings of the educated. Unfortunately when discussing education there were many subjects on which medieval authors were silent. Writers often concentrated on particular elements of their own training, or that of others, and usually cited their experiences to make points that had nothing to do with the classroom. At the same time, in constructing their texts medieval authors commonly drew upon a rich seam of classical literature, placing their works in an intellectual tradition and demonstrating an idealisation of the past (and sometimes the present), but revealing little about contemporary educational experiences.

Yet from the mid-twelfth century education was also prominently explored in a very different way, as allegorical representations of the seven liberal arts began to appear on church facades in northern France. The highly visible locations of these cycles of figures, together with their incorporation into much larger schemes, promoted education to a wider audience than the literate who had access to manuscripts, and presented it as an ideal quality. The personified figures of the arts of Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic (the three arts of the trivium), together with Music, Arithmetic, Geometry and Astronomy (the quadrivium), were sometimes accompanied by Philosophy. All these allegorical figures had appeared in earlier literature, including Martianus Capella's Marriage of Mercury and Philology, written in the fifth century, and Boethius’ sixth-century The Consolation of Philosophy. In the latter the arts were only briefly mentioned as the handmaidens of Philosophy, but in the former each art was described as part of an account of the discipline she represented, albeit often in an abstract form not easily interpreted by artists. Like the authors of medieval texts that made reference to education, the patrons and designers of the sculpted facades, if not the artists who executed them, were probably highly educated men who sought to promote their views of learning. In addition to the sculpted facades, a wide range of decorated objects that took education as their subject were produced during the twelfth century. The liberal arts appeared in metalwork and manuscripts, whilst scenes of schooling were represented in these media and in stained glass. At the same time, objects for use in study were sometimes decorated to enhance their value, or to clarify the subject they were designed to communicate.