Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living
Peter Jones
Mar 2026 · Penguin Random House Audio
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About this audiobook
From historian Peter Jones comes a surprising and insightful guide to navigating contemporary life through the wisdom of the Middle Ages
A few years ago, Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia when living through his third icy winter tipped him into a dark place. Luckily, he knew something few of us know: that The Middle Ages were the golden age of self-help.
In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, history professor Peter Jones makes the case that never in history has so much energy and talent gone into studying how the mind works. In this charming and illuminating guide, he reveals a lost map of our passions and impulses that can help us understand our own human struggles in new and powerful ways. Because although we now think of the Seven Deadly Sins as a catalog of forbidden behavior, in the Middle Ages, when they were at the height of their popularity, they were a path to self-knowledge. A psychological map that laid out seven basic patterns of thought, showing how our thinking can go astray and how we can find our way home.
With beautiful illustrations drawn from medieval art and literature, Peter Jones explores the lives of scholars and saints, mystics and monarchs, along with the insights they offer into temptation, frustration, addiction, compulsion, burnout, rage, fear, anxiety, and grief. Self-Help from the Middle Ages is an irresistible read for lovers of history and all those who seek wisdom from the past.
A few years ago, Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia when living through his third icy winter tipped him into a dark place. Luckily, he knew something few of us know: that The Middle Ages were the golden age of self-help.
In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, history professor Peter Jones makes the case that never in history has so much energy and talent gone into studying how the mind works. In this charming and illuminating guide, he reveals a lost map of our passions and impulses that can help us understand our own human struggles in new and powerful ways. Because although we now think of the Seven Deadly Sins as a catalog of forbidden behavior, in the Middle Ages, when they were at the height of their popularity, they were a path to self-knowledge. A psychological map that laid out seven basic patterns of thought, showing how our thinking can go astray and how we can find our way home.
With beautiful illustrations drawn from medieval art and literature, Peter Jones explores the lives of scholars and saints, mystics and monarchs, along with the insights they offer into temptation, frustration, addiction, compulsion, burnout, rage, fear, anxiety, and grief. Self-Help from the Middle Ages is an irresistible read for lovers of history and all those who seek wisdom from the past.
About the author
PETER JONES received a Ph.D. in medieval history from New York University in 2014. He has taught for thirteen years at universities including University College London, NYU, the University of Toronto, and Complutense University of Madrid (where he is currently a Marie Curie Fellow). For four years he taught at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of Tyumen in Siberia, where he was Chair of History. He has received research fellowships from the Warburg Institute, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, and Brown University, as well as the Marie Curie. His first book, Laughter & Power in the Twelfth Century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
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