Self-Help from the Middle Ages
What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living
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- 予約注文
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- リリース予定日：2026年4月14日
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
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
Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia when his third icy winter there plunged him into a dark place. Luckily, he knew something few of us know-- that for all its reputation for darkness and superstition, the Middle Ages were the golden age of self-help. So he set out on a journey to explore the wisdom of medieval scholars, saints, and mystics, looking for an alternative path through the challenges of modern life.
Never in history, Jones marvels in Self-Help from the Middle Ages, has so much energy and talent gone into studying how the mind works as in the medieval centuries. Although today we think of the Seven Deadly Sins as a catalog of forbidden behavior, in the Middle Ages, at the height of their currency, they were a path to self-knowledge and self-forgiveness. Together, pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust were 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.
In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, Jones explores each sin, searching the hellscapes of Hieronymous Bosch and Giotto, the intimate confessions of Dante and Margery Kempe, and the personal struggles of Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena. Along the way he discovers a treasure trove of lost truths about temptation, frustration, addiction, compulsion, burnout, rage, fear, anxiety, and grief that still pulse with life. With beautiful illustrations drawn from medieval art and literature, his book is a gift to all who love history and anyone who has ever sought 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.
