Self-Help from the Middle Ages
What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Jones debuts with an illuminating and eclectic survey of how medieval thinkers grappled with perennial psychological challenges through the framework of the seven deadly sins. Drawn to the topic when his own "burnout, disillusionment, and... melancholy" made him wonder how someone from 700 years ago would have weathered a similar crisis, Jones delved into art and literature of the High and Later Middle Ages—from 1100 to 1500 CE—a period he suggests was uniquely preoccupied with "understanding the human mind." Thirteenth-century Parisian theologian Jean de la Rochelle thought each of the sins was "a form of distorted love" that tips over into disorder when "we feel it too strongly," and in the 14th century Petrarch framed envy as an emotion with positive characteristics—curiosity, obsessiveness—that might be harnessed "to achieve something... useful." Catalonian doctor Arnaud de Vilanova (1240–1311) experimented with a series of ineffective drugs for treating anger, including one potion made of ox tongue and wine purported to cure rage overnight by balancing the body's four humours, while working to fortify his heart with "love and compassion" to prevent anger from taking root. Throughout, the author interweaves colorful details of medieval therapies with a compassionate commentary on how the "most intimate struggles of our lives" are part of a quest to understand the human condition that's existed for nearly as long as humanity itself. This captivates.
