Self-Help From the Middle Ages: A Journey Into the Medieval Mind

‘One of the most compelling medieval history books I have ever read’ IAN MORTIMER
‘An enthralling book’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘Exhilarating … funny, informative, even optimistic’ FINANCIAL TIMES
’Jones is a thoughtful, well-travelled scholar with an eye for a killer image’ SUNDAY TIMES
’Accessibly erudite and infectiously entertaining’ TELEGRAPH
‘A lovely book’ PETER FRANKOPAN

A disarming, surprising history which explores art, mysticism and literature to show how the Middle Ages used the Seven Deadly Sins as a roadmap for a happier and healthier life.

What can a twelfth-century monk teach us about burnout, envy, or despair? Far more than we might imagine. In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, historian Peter Jones travels through Europe’s archives and libraries to uncover a lost psychology: a world where confession was therapy, sin was diagnosis, and the Seven Deadly Sins served as a map of the human mind.

From the deserts of Egypt to the Vatican Library, from Dante’s Florence to Catherine of Siena’s cell, Jones introduces the thinkers, mystics and rebels who wrestled with the same questions that preoccupy us now: how to live with our flaws, forgive ourselves, and find meaning amid confusion.

Medieval lives and landscapes come vividly alive: Siberian winters and Parisian manuscripts, lustful saints and anxious scholars, candlelit abbeys and vaults of forgotten books. Wise, surprising, and deeply humane, Self-Help from the Middle Ages reveals that the remedies we seek for our 21st-century anxieties may have been with us all along—written in brown Gothic ink on lambskin seven hundred years ago.

‘Revelatory … a moving, eloquent and important book’ SPECTATOR
‘A wonderful, eye-opening book … Jones is brilliant company and a wonderful teacher’ MAIL ON SUNDAY
’‘Funny and profound … a great book.’ XAND VAN TULLEKEN, doctor, broadcaster and host of What’s Up Docs?
‘Brimming with exceptional insight’ HELEN CARR, author of Sceptred Isle
‘Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived’ BRUCE HOLSINGER, author of Culpability