Self-Help from the Middle Ages - by Peter Jones (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Self-Help from the Middle Ages is one of the most compelling medieval history books I have ever read. It does what I feel all good history books should do - it informs us about ourselves; it does not just tell us stories about the long-since dead. It will tantalise and delight those who think they know everything there is to know about the medieval mindset as well as those who cannot imagine that there were once different ways of thinking. I genuinely loved this book."
-Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England

"This book came as a wonderful surprise. Peter Jones, a learned historian, combines self-help, the middle ages, and autobiographical confessions and somehow weaves a tapestry that triumphantly relates all three. In particular, he highlights the subtlety and psychological insights in medieval writers, whose wise treatments of disorderly desires have helped him to navigate his own life, and could help any of us to do the same."
-Simon Blackburn, author of Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

"Peter Jones' Self-Help from the Middle Ages is a treat for the history glutton. Funny, candid, and revelatory, it shows how medieval thinkers struggled with the same quirks of the human condition as we do. I loved following Jones on his quest to decode the medieval recipe for a contented life, whether it was to a classroom in Siberia, a library in London, or a Spanish cathedral claiming to house the Holy Grail. Jones makes the Middle Ages feel close enough to touch - and its lessons are needed now more than ever.
-Irina Dumitrescu, writer and Professor of Medieval English, University of Bonn

"From Lucifer's iridescent footwear, to supermarket shopping in Vladimir Putin's Siberia, this is a unique and delightful book: part personal memoir, part investigation of the very idea of sin, part magical mystery tour through some of the world's greater medieval book collections. I can think of nothing else quite like it. Written by an acknowledged expert, yet with the thrill of a treasure hunt, it blows the cobwebs off centuries in which, however virtuous those in pursuit of goodness, the Devil always had the best tunes."
-Nick Vincent, Professor of Medieval History, University of East Anglia

"In the fine tradition of medieval confessional writing, Self-Help from the Middle Ages examines the ways in which voices from the past can help us navigate our present-day struggles, no matter what they may be. Combining thoughtful scholarship, timeless wisdom, and aching vulnerability, Peter Jones reminds us that the one constant in history is the beautiful complexity of the human heart."
-Danièle Cybulskie, author and host of The Medieval Podcast

"Self-Help from the Middle Ages manages to be two wondrous things at once: a dazzling tour of medieval moral theology and a riveting guide to that era's lessons for our contemporary lives. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, Jones' book will delight readers with its erudition, relevance, and wisdom."
-Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability and The Invention of Fire

"A scholarly and forgiving rethinking of problematic behavior for a world sketched by psychology and secularism."
-Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

PETER JONES received his Ph.D. in medieval history from New York University. He taught at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of Tyumen in Siberia, where he was Chair of History. Today, he is a Marie Curie fellow at Complutense University of Madrid.