Self-Help from the Middle Ages

In this charming journey into the past, a historian reveals medieval wisdom that can still guide us today.

"One of the most compelling medieval history books I have ever read." —Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England

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.