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Self-Help From the Middle Ages: What Medieval History Can Teach Us About Living a Happy, Healthy 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 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 how to live with our flaws, forgive ourselves, and find meaning amid confusion.
Medieval lives and landscapes come vividly 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.
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 how to live with our flaws, forgive ourselves, and find meaning amid confusion.
Medieval lives and landscapes come vividly 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.
360 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 2, 2026
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April 14, 2026
The Cold That Refuses to Leave, and the Language That Finally Knows Its Name
In “Self-Help from the Middle Ages,” Peter Jones turns the Seven Deadly Sins into a bracing grammar for burnout, vanity, longing, and the parts of the mind that do not improve on schedule.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 13th, 2026
In a room held between winter light and old reflection, this solitary figure gathers the cold stillness, moral weather, and hard-won recognition at the heart of “Self-Help from the Middle Ages.”
Self-help books usually begin by flattering the buyer. Better habits. Cleaner mornings. A more obedient mind. Peter Jones begins in Tyumen, in weather that feels less seasonal than official. He is teaching medieval history, growing colder in every sense, and standing by a radiator while smoke lifts into a pink sky. The life has not blown up. It has quietly gone out of fit.
The premise arrives flirting with gimmick: the Seven Deadly Sins for the burnout era, monastic wisdom with a fresh dust jacket and a few life hacks tucked under the habit. Jones steps around the trap. “Self-Help from the Middle Ages” comes in wearing the costume of recovered wisdom, but the real book underneath is leaner, colder, and less interested in cheering anyone up. Its deepest claim is not that medieval people had the right hacks. It is that older moral language can still get closer to the bruise than our official speech about symptoms, habits, and wellness.
Jones knows the approved labels for his condition. Depression. Burnout. Therapy. Medication. He does not mock any of them. What he senses, though, is that they are often better at filing the problem than at giving it edges. They log distress. They do not always restore contour. What name would 1300 have put on this? A priest, he decides, might have called it sloth – not laziness, which is much too petty a word for the thing, but akedia, a cooling of attachment, a falling-out of love with life.
That question peels the sales varnish off and leaves the book’s real machinery humming underneath. The opening movement carries Jones from Siberian freeze to a Dublin manuscript library, where he consults William Peraldus’s “Summa of Virtues and Vices” and discovers, with the kind of shock that turns premise into necessity, that medieval language can feel unnervingly exact. The revelation is not just that sloth describes him. It is how. Peraldus’s account turns on “coldness,” then sharpens the point by arguing that lukewarmness may be worse. Coldness at least strips life down to essentials. Lukewarmness is the deadlier state – overstuffed, complacent, blind to its own hollowness. It is an excellent reversal. Jones is very good at them.
From there he moves through the seven old traps – Pride through Lust – by way of poems, manuscripts, anecdotes, and his own private weather. Before that, though, he goes back to Evagrius Ponticus, the desert monk who catalogued eight recurring “generic thoughts,” then forward through John Cassian and Gregory the Great into the full medieval afterlife of the scheme. Its hardest thought arrives before the book has fully unpacked its luggage. A “deadly sin” sounds operatic. A “generic thought” sounds like Tuesday before lunch.
That move makes the whole scheme feel less gothic and more daily. The sins stop looking like stained-glass warning labels and start resembling the mind’s favorite crooked habits. Sloth is not laziness but cold drift. Pride is not confidence but self-sealing. Envy is not simple wanting but a wish that another person’s flourishing curdle. Jones’s best move is to put the sand back into the language. He is not trying to make these words quaintly relevant. He is trying to make them sting again.
This is where the book breaks free of its own hook. It is not finally a book about medieval self-help. It is a book about the fraudulence of the upgrade fantasy. Jones keeps edging away from the hope, still busy in our century, that the mind can be tidied into reliable function if only the correct method is found. His strongest pages keep returning to recurrence. Thoughts recur. Moods recur. Humiliations recur. Purity is not on offer. Recognition is. Its governing image appears in Dublin, when Jones encounters the claim that the Jebusites within the city cannot simply be exterminated; they must be lived with. There, in one severe metaphor, is the whole philosophy. You do not evict the mind’s unwanted tenants once and for all. You govern in their presence.
That is the book’s real audacity. It does not offer the reader improvement in any familiar sense. It offers harder company. The promise is not that you will emerge corrected, optimized, finally aligned with your best morning self. The promise is that an older vocabulary may describe your compromises, vanities, numbnesses, and small private disgraces more truthfully than the softer terms to which modern life has grown attached. Jones is after recognition, not rescue. He is also after something rarer than comfort: moral precision without moral melodrama.
His prose matters because it understands that description is not garnish. It is method. He thinks in materials, rooms, temperatures. Frozen eyelashes. Thawing boots. A violet-uniformed cloakroom attendant. Rubber gloves in the manuscript library. A framed Yuri Gagarin. A university building that, in winter, becomes a submarine. These details are not there to show that the author can write. They do diagnostic work. The Siberian cold gives his inward cold a body. The “rushing river” turns paralysis into something kinetic and humiliating rather than inert. Even a comic set piece – a university photo shoot in which Jones is asked to pose as each of the seven sins, only to discover that his pride face sits perilously close to his ordinary one – does more than brighten the weather. It turns the old moral vocabulary social, embarrassing, and unmistakably current.
Then there is the book’s temper: learned, faintly sheepish, and alert to the comedy of its own seriousness. Jones can write about manuscripts and monastic psychology without sounding as if he would relish being trapped at a conference dinner with himself. He also knows when to let embarrassment puncture revelation. That helps. So does the fact that he never turns suffering into a credential. It supplies pressure, not moral prestige. The memoir is there to weight the argument, not to solicit reverence for the sufferer.
This tone matters because the material could so easily have hardened into one of two equally unhelpful books. It could have become a briskly marketable “ancient wisdom for modern problems” package, all polished consolation and strategic quotability. Or it could have become a scholar’s rebuke to the present, full of archive fumes and the faintly sour pleasure of announcing that medieval people understood everything better. Jones does neither. He writes with enough warmth to keep the book human and enough mischief to stop it from becoming pious. The effect is not charm, exactly. Charm would be too easy a word for a book this interested in frostbite. It is a more durable quality than that: composure with nerves still in it.
The structure has a good back. The opening chapters earn the scheme before the scheme begins carrying serious argumentative load. Then come the seven sins, each broken into three titled movements. The repetition is not a structural accident. It is part of the case. A book about repeated distortions should probably repeat itself, at least formally. Each section comes back through the same territory from a different edge, and by the middle one feels not a tidy list of vices but a snarl of drives, humiliations, appetites, and recurring pressures.
By the middle, though, you can hear the gears. Reframe the sin. Historicize it. Test it against modern life or Jones’s own. Gather the payoff. None of this is clumsy. If anything, it is too smooth. The book’s clarity comes with a bill, and the bill is surprise. Now and then the argument confirms itself once more when a harder complication would have done more. The design keeps the book upright but shrinks its ability to surprise itself. This is not fatal. It is the cost of a lucid system whose very elegance invites reuse.
The same neatness leaves a seam you can run a finger along in the book’s treatment of the modern world. Jones secularizes, or at least modernizes, a medieval moral scheme without reinstalling the theology that once held it together. That is a defensible bargain. Most readers are not waiting to be marched back into medieval cosmology. Still, the stitching shows. Therapy, diagnosis, and medication often arrive in brisk outline, while medieval categories get the full theatrical advantage. The contrast clarifies, but a little too obligingly. Jones wants the old terms to matter, and now and then the comparison is arranged a shade too carefully in their favor.
The best pages wriggle loose of that arrangement. Jones does not simply prettify the past. He clarifies the present. He is especially good on our habit of placing what hurts in cleaner and cleaner language. Sometimes euphemism is kindness. Sometimes it is evasion. “Self-Help from the Middle Ages” makes a convincing case that words like sloth, pride, and envy can wound vanity in a way upholstered vocabularies cannot, and that the wound may occasionally instruct. Not because medieval people were harsher and therefore wiser. Because they were sometimes better at admitting conflict into the description.
That is also why the book feels relevant without straining after relevance. Jones has the good sense not to brandish his material at the week’s headlines. Current life enters only after the medieval terms have already named, more sharply, what our own language has blurred. A late passage on Silicon Valley’s interest in the sins as a product map – envy here, anger there, sloth elsewhere – is sharp for exactly that reason. Medieval thinkers tried to name recurring distortions of desire. Contemporary platforms industrialize them. Jones makes the point, then has the tact to leave it there. He does not lunge for a cheap present-day clincher. He lets the continuity speak for itself, and because of that restraint the point lands harder.
More broadly, the book speaks to a culture abraded by improvement creed. Its courtesy has a little insolence in it: the self may not chiefly need optimization. It may need better names and less flattery. This is the sort of claim that can sound glib in summary and quite bracing on the page. Jones earns it by refusing to prettify the consequences. If the book were more frankly “helpful,” it would also be less true to the experience it describes. He is after a sterner form of usefulness, one that does not confuse being cheered up with being seen clearly.
Which is why the ending does not need to raise its voice. “The Seven, Again” offers no redemptive flourish. Anything louder would betray the enterprise. What it offers instead is a clarified restatement: these patterns are not relics, not melodramatic leftovers from a superstitious age, and not enemies to be neatly expelled. They are recurring twists in the ways we love, compare, withdraw, consume, and desire. Purity is not on offer. Recognition is.
I land at 88/100 – 4 stars. That seems fair for a book this shapely, this nimble-minded, and this a little too pleased with its own design. What remains in the room after the covers close is not the sales gimmick of medieval self-help. It is the sterner civility Jones extends. Not rescue. Not an upgrade. Better names, rougher weather, and the cold recognition that understanding the mind’s weather is not the same thing as changing it. The book begins with a man at a window in deep winter, watching smoke rise into a pink sky. It ends by giving that cold a shape – and, for once, not mistaking shape for cure.
These early compositional studies test the balance of solitude, window light, and negative space, searching for the one arrangement that could carry the book’s coldness without over-explaining it.
The underdrawing reveals the quiet skeleton of the final image: figure, window, radiator, and the first measured place where the older presences begin to return into view.
Here the painting begins to breathe, as structure gives way to atmosphere and the first washes of winter light, interior hush, and psychic weather settle across the page.
This swatch sheet shows the disciplined palette behind the final watercolor, where the cover’s greens, teals, rusts, creams, and acid yellows become the emotional grammar of the image.
These reflected-figure studies test how the book’s old moral forms might appear in the glass – present but not dominant, symbolic but not spectral, half-memory and half-recognition.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
In “Self-Help from the Middle Ages,” Peter Jones turns the Seven Deadly Sins into a bracing grammar for burnout, vanity, longing, and the parts of the mind that do not improve on schedule.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 13th, 2026
In a room held between winter light and old reflection, this solitary figure gathers the cold stillness, moral weather, and hard-won recognition at the heart of “Self-Help from the Middle Ages.”
Self-help books usually begin by flattering the buyer. Better habits. Cleaner mornings. A more obedient mind. Peter Jones begins in Tyumen, in weather that feels less seasonal than official. He is teaching medieval history, growing colder in every sense, and standing by a radiator while smoke lifts into a pink sky. The life has not blown up. It has quietly gone out of fit.
The premise arrives flirting with gimmick: the Seven Deadly Sins for the burnout era, monastic wisdom with a fresh dust jacket and a few life hacks tucked under the habit. Jones steps around the trap. “Self-Help from the Middle Ages” comes in wearing the costume of recovered wisdom, but the real book underneath is leaner, colder, and less interested in cheering anyone up. Its deepest claim is not that medieval people had the right hacks. It is that older moral language can still get closer to the bruise than our official speech about symptoms, habits, and wellness.
Jones knows the approved labels for his condition. Depression. Burnout. Therapy. Medication. He does not mock any of them. What he senses, though, is that they are often better at filing the problem than at giving it edges. They log distress. They do not always restore contour. What name would 1300 have put on this? A priest, he decides, might have called it sloth – not laziness, which is much too petty a word for the thing, but akedia, a cooling of attachment, a falling-out of love with life.
That question peels the sales varnish off and leaves the book’s real machinery humming underneath. The opening movement carries Jones from Siberian freeze to a Dublin manuscript library, where he consults William Peraldus’s “Summa of Virtues and Vices” and discovers, with the kind of shock that turns premise into necessity, that medieval language can feel unnervingly exact. The revelation is not just that sloth describes him. It is how. Peraldus’s account turns on “coldness,” then sharpens the point by arguing that lukewarmness may be worse. Coldness at least strips life down to essentials. Lukewarmness is the deadlier state – overstuffed, complacent, blind to its own hollowness. It is an excellent reversal. Jones is very good at them.
From there he moves through the seven old traps – Pride through Lust – by way of poems, manuscripts, anecdotes, and his own private weather. Before that, though, he goes back to Evagrius Ponticus, the desert monk who catalogued eight recurring “generic thoughts,” then forward through John Cassian and Gregory the Great into the full medieval afterlife of the scheme. Its hardest thought arrives before the book has fully unpacked its luggage. A “deadly sin” sounds operatic. A “generic thought” sounds like Tuesday before lunch.
That move makes the whole scheme feel less gothic and more daily. The sins stop looking like stained-glass warning labels and start resembling the mind’s favorite crooked habits. Sloth is not laziness but cold drift. Pride is not confidence but self-sealing. Envy is not simple wanting but a wish that another person’s flourishing curdle. Jones’s best move is to put the sand back into the language. He is not trying to make these words quaintly relevant. He is trying to make them sting again.
This is where the book breaks free of its own hook. It is not finally a book about medieval self-help. It is a book about the fraudulence of the upgrade fantasy. Jones keeps edging away from the hope, still busy in our century, that the mind can be tidied into reliable function if only the correct method is found. His strongest pages keep returning to recurrence. Thoughts recur. Moods recur. Humiliations recur. Purity is not on offer. Recognition is. Its governing image appears in Dublin, when Jones encounters the claim that the Jebusites within the city cannot simply be exterminated; they must be lived with. There, in one severe metaphor, is the whole philosophy. You do not evict the mind’s unwanted tenants once and for all. You govern in their presence.
That is the book’s real audacity. It does not offer the reader improvement in any familiar sense. It offers harder company. The promise is not that you will emerge corrected, optimized, finally aligned with your best morning self. The promise is that an older vocabulary may describe your compromises, vanities, numbnesses, and small private disgraces more truthfully than the softer terms to which modern life has grown attached. Jones is after recognition, not rescue. He is also after something rarer than comfort: moral precision without moral melodrama.
His prose matters because it understands that description is not garnish. It is method. He thinks in materials, rooms, temperatures. Frozen eyelashes. Thawing boots. A violet-uniformed cloakroom attendant. Rubber gloves in the manuscript library. A framed Yuri Gagarin. A university building that, in winter, becomes a submarine. These details are not there to show that the author can write. They do diagnostic work. The Siberian cold gives his inward cold a body. The “rushing river” turns paralysis into something kinetic and humiliating rather than inert. Even a comic set piece – a university photo shoot in which Jones is asked to pose as each of the seven sins, only to discover that his pride face sits perilously close to his ordinary one – does more than brighten the weather. It turns the old moral vocabulary social, embarrassing, and unmistakably current.
Then there is the book’s temper: learned, faintly sheepish, and alert to the comedy of its own seriousness. Jones can write about manuscripts and monastic psychology without sounding as if he would relish being trapped at a conference dinner with himself. He also knows when to let embarrassment puncture revelation. That helps. So does the fact that he never turns suffering into a credential. It supplies pressure, not moral prestige. The memoir is there to weight the argument, not to solicit reverence for the sufferer.
This tone matters because the material could so easily have hardened into one of two equally unhelpful books. It could have become a briskly marketable “ancient wisdom for modern problems” package, all polished consolation and strategic quotability. Or it could have become a scholar’s rebuke to the present, full of archive fumes and the faintly sour pleasure of announcing that medieval people understood everything better. Jones does neither. He writes with enough warmth to keep the book human and enough mischief to stop it from becoming pious. The effect is not charm, exactly. Charm would be too easy a word for a book this interested in frostbite. It is a more durable quality than that: composure with nerves still in it.
The structure has a good back. The opening chapters earn the scheme before the scheme begins carrying serious argumentative load. Then come the seven sins, each broken into three titled movements. The repetition is not a structural accident. It is part of the case. A book about repeated distortions should probably repeat itself, at least formally. Each section comes back through the same territory from a different edge, and by the middle one feels not a tidy list of vices but a snarl of drives, humiliations, appetites, and recurring pressures.
By the middle, though, you can hear the gears. Reframe the sin. Historicize it. Test it against modern life or Jones’s own. Gather the payoff. None of this is clumsy. If anything, it is too smooth. The book’s clarity comes with a bill, and the bill is surprise. Now and then the argument confirms itself once more when a harder complication would have done more. The design keeps the book upright but shrinks its ability to surprise itself. This is not fatal. It is the cost of a lucid system whose very elegance invites reuse.
The same neatness leaves a seam you can run a finger along in the book’s treatment of the modern world. Jones secularizes, or at least modernizes, a medieval moral scheme without reinstalling the theology that once held it together. That is a defensible bargain. Most readers are not waiting to be marched back into medieval cosmology. Still, the stitching shows. Therapy, diagnosis, and medication often arrive in brisk outline, while medieval categories get the full theatrical advantage. The contrast clarifies, but a little too obligingly. Jones wants the old terms to matter, and now and then the comparison is arranged a shade too carefully in their favor.
The best pages wriggle loose of that arrangement. Jones does not simply prettify the past. He clarifies the present. He is especially good on our habit of placing what hurts in cleaner and cleaner language. Sometimes euphemism is kindness. Sometimes it is evasion. “Self-Help from the Middle Ages” makes a convincing case that words like sloth, pride, and envy can wound vanity in a way upholstered vocabularies cannot, and that the wound may occasionally instruct. Not because medieval people were harsher and therefore wiser. Because they were sometimes better at admitting conflict into the description.
That is also why the book feels relevant without straining after relevance. Jones has the good sense not to brandish his material at the week’s headlines. Current life enters only after the medieval terms have already named, more sharply, what our own language has blurred. A late passage on Silicon Valley’s interest in the sins as a product map – envy here, anger there, sloth elsewhere – is sharp for exactly that reason. Medieval thinkers tried to name recurring distortions of desire. Contemporary platforms industrialize them. Jones makes the point, then has the tact to leave it there. He does not lunge for a cheap present-day clincher. He lets the continuity speak for itself, and because of that restraint the point lands harder.
More broadly, the book speaks to a culture abraded by improvement creed. Its courtesy has a little insolence in it: the self may not chiefly need optimization. It may need better names and less flattery. This is the sort of claim that can sound glib in summary and quite bracing on the page. Jones earns it by refusing to prettify the consequences. If the book were more frankly “helpful,” it would also be less true to the experience it describes. He is after a sterner form of usefulness, one that does not confuse being cheered up with being seen clearly.
Which is why the ending does not need to raise its voice. “The Seven, Again” offers no redemptive flourish. Anything louder would betray the enterprise. What it offers instead is a clarified restatement: these patterns are not relics, not melodramatic leftovers from a superstitious age, and not enemies to be neatly expelled. They are recurring twists in the ways we love, compare, withdraw, consume, and desire. Purity is not on offer. Recognition is.
I land at 88/100 – 4 stars. That seems fair for a book this shapely, this nimble-minded, and this a little too pleased with its own design. What remains in the room after the covers close is not the sales gimmick of medieval self-help. It is the sterner civility Jones extends. Not rescue. Not an upgrade. Better names, rougher weather, and the cold recognition that understanding the mind’s weather is not the same thing as changing it. The book begins with a man at a window in deep winter, watching smoke rise into a pink sky. It ends by giving that cold a shape – and, for once, not mistaking shape for cure.
These early compositional studies test the balance of solitude, window light, and negative space, searching for the one arrangement that could carry the book’s coldness without over-explaining it.
The underdrawing reveals the quiet skeleton of the final image: figure, window, radiator, and the first measured place where the older presences begin to return into view.
Here the painting begins to breathe, as structure gives way to atmosphere and the first washes of winter light, interior hush, and psychic weather settle across the page.
This swatch sheet shows the disciplined palette behind the final watercolor, where the cover’s greens, teals, rusts, creams, and acid yellows become the emotional grammar of the image.
These reflected-figure studies test how the book’s old moral forms might appear in the glass – present but not dominant, symbolic but not spectral, half-memory and half-recognition.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
May 11, 2026
I was pleased that the self-help aspects were not pushy. It was more framed as here is what people valued in the middle ages, and here is the context; feel free to compare it to your own experiences as the author does.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: From medieval historian Peter Jones comes a groundbreaking guide to navigating contemporary life through the wisdom of the Seven Deadly Sins.
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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: What happens when a scholarly British man with an advanced medieval-history degree from an American school gets a seriously good job in Russophone academia? He moves to Siberia! (Before the Ukraine war begins. He lives in Madrid now.)
Siberia. The place Russia sends people to die in misery. A byword, in US English anyway, for grim, awful exile, for the place you're sent to pay for your sins. I'm afraid this is where I start revealing my prejudices: I envied this polyglot scholar for his seriously good luck. I envied him for living a life I'm still feeling angry at being denied a chance to pursue (though Siberia was never in my mind as an option). So already two of the deadly sins ticked off—again—my life's list of the damned things committed. Oh okay, I'm getting the point now, thought I.
Siberia, the severeness of it, wore on the spirit of Author Jones. He experienced the dark night of the soul, the terrible trackless waste of depression. Being a scholar by nature the solution was obvious: you are not the first person to have this problem. How did those others handle it? The seven deadly sins offer up a schema for understanding the workings of the human mind as well as a perspective check on what your emotional weather really means.
These "sins" are, of course, deeply enmeshed with christian concepts of a religiously ordered universe. Sin more broadly is a religious concept of transgressing a divinely ordained code and appears in multiple religious traditions. It's only natural that a medievalist from England would gravitate towards concepts familiar from his scholarly activities.
In the memoir portions of this narrative, the author evokes very movingly the experience of researching, identifying, and handling medieval manuscripts that contain the seven deadly sins and their explications of how these can be used to improve one's soul. The goal in these readings iss to give the reader a map towards salvation, union with the god of the christians; but as Author Jones elucidates, how different is that goal from modern self-help books' stated goal of helping one become better, happier, more adept at navigating your life. People have sought ways to understand their inner workings, how to cultivate their minds/souls into "better" or "happier" behaviors since the oracle at Delphi...much earlier than that, I am certain, because a pithy aperçu like "know thyself" isn't a first draft, and it is carved in literal stone so it's been workshopped to a fare-thee-well, though it wasn't done in writing so the records are implicit only.
We're highly intelligent, us humans, curious about ourselves because we're so different from other creatures. We have access to the thoughts and the musings and the conclusions of millennia of our forebears. A scholar would know where and how to look for insight into issues common to us all. Descriptions of depression, of psychological maladjustments, maladaptive behaviors, and solutions to the problems arising therefrom, might vary but the impetus to look for ways to be, feel, act "better" is constant. Author Jones seeks the commonality between the seven deadly sins and modern self-help schemata because he needs help, knows our ancestors...sons, daughters, lovers, spouses just like us...needed help figuring out the best ways to be fulfilled. He accomplishes this in the way that best uses his personal strengths. He tells us about his quest in plainly personal terms, clearly stating his stakes in starting the quest. (I frame it as a quest because he's a medievalist and "happiness" is a grail quest.) It is more this strand of his narrative that I found involving, engaging. I was less invested in the rubber-meets-the-road formulations of how the personally offensive to me religious concept of the sins themselves represent paths to self-knowledge. This is a very useful and, to me, persuasive argument. It's offensive to me because the religion it's embedded within is evil and vile, used to create division and enact horrors of cruelty; if there is a "God" as they name her, and she tolerates these terrible acts committed in her nsme, she is not the kind of god who deserves worship.
None of that is addressed in this book; I can't offer an otherwise fully merited fifth star because to do so is to accept a fundamental agreement with an argument for "God" and her christian system's validity.
This is purely a personal inability to tolerate any support of the christian worldview,however tacit it may be, as in any way moral or positively constructive.
The Publisher Says: From medieval historian Peter Jones comes a groundbreaking guide to navigating contemporary life through the wisdom of the Seven Deadly Sins.
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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: What happens when a scholarly British man with an advanced medieval-history degree from an American school gets a seriously good job in Russophone academia? He moves to Siberia! (Before the Ukraine war begins. He lives in Madrid now.)
Siberia. The place Russia sends people to die in misery. A byword, in US English anyway, for grim, awful exile, for the place you're sent to pay for your sins. I'm afraid this is where I start revealing my prejudices: I envied this polyglot scholar for his seriously good luck. I envied him for living a life I'm still feeling angry at being denied a chance to pursue (though Siberia was never in my mind as an option). So already two of the deadly sins ticked off—again—my life's list of the damned things committed. Oh okay, I'm getting the point now, thought I.
Siberia, the severeness of it, wore on the spirit of Author Jones. He experienced the dark night of the soul, the terrible trackless waste of depression. Being a scholar by nature the solution was obvious: you are not the first person to have this problem. How did those others handle it? The seven deadly sins offer up a schema for understanding the workings of the human mind as well as a perspective check on what your emotional weather really means.
These "sins" are, of course, deeply enmeshed with christian concepts of a religiously ordered universe. Sin more broadly is a religious concept of transgressing a divinely ordained code and appears in multiple religious traditions. It's only natural that a medievalist from England would gravitate towards concepts familiar from his scholarly activities.
In the memoir portions of this narrative, the author evokes very movingly the experience of researching, identifying, and handling medieval manuscripts that contain the seven deadly sins and their explications of how these can be used to improve one's soul. The goal in these readings iss to give the reader a map towards salvation, union with the god of the christians; but as Author Jones elucidates, how different is that goal from modern self-help books' stated goal of helping one become better, happier, more adept at navigating your life. People have sought ways to understand their inner workings, how to cultivate their minds/souls into "better" or "happier" behaviors since the oracle at Delphi...much earlier than that, I am certain, because a pithy aperçu like "know thyself" isn't a first draft, and it is carved in literal stone so it's been workshopped to a fare-thee-well, though it wasn't done in writing so the records are implicit only.
We're highly intelligent, us humans, curious about ourselves because we're so different from other creatures. We have access to the thoughts and the musings and the conclusions of millennia of our forebears. A scholar would know where and how to look for insight into issues common to us all. Descriptions of depression, of psychological maladjustments, maladaptive behaviors, and solutions to the problems arising therefrom, might vary but the impetus to look for ways to be, feel, act "better" is constant. Author Jones seeks the commonality between the seven deadly sins and modern self-help schemata because he needs help, knows our ancestors...sons, daughters, lovers, spouses just like us...needed help figuring out the best ways to be fulfilled. He accomplishes this in the way that best uses his personal strengths. He tells us about his quest in plainly personal terms, clearly stating his stakes in starting the quest. (I frame it as a quest because he's a medievalist and "happiness" is a grail quest.) It is more this strand of his narrative that I found involving, engaging. I was less invested in the rubber-meets-the-road formulations of how the personally offensive to me religious concept of the sins themselves represent paths to self-knowledge. This is a very useful and, to me, persuasive argument. It's offensive to me because the religion it's embedded within is evil and vile, used to create division and enact horrors of cruelty; if there is a "God" as they name her, and she tolerates these terrible acts committed in her nsme, she is not the kind of god who deserves worship.
None of that is addressed in this book; I can't offer an otherwise fully merited fifth star because to do so is to accept a fundamental agreement with an argument for "God" and her christian system's validity.
This is purely a personal inability to tolerate any support of the christian worldview,however tacit it may be, as in any way moral or positively constructive.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC
3.5 but rounding down. I’ll be honest. I think, if the title had been something else, something a bit more telling regarding the seven deadly sins, I might have rounded up to 4. I feel like the title might be misleading to some people (possibly some of the other reviewers, after having read some of their reviews). I wasn’t expecting each chapter to represent a deadly sin. Not that I personally mind, but again, maybe a subtitle mentioning this might help (or repel) other readers.
The preface was a bit confusing and… jumbled. And I stared to wonder if this was more of a memoir or personal reflection journey. In a way, it is the author’s journey, but having read the whole thing, I can understand the reasoning a bit more. Still, once I got past that clustered beginning, I enjoyed the book, for the most part.
The writing is sometimes odd. The present tense parts are a little weird, considering I don’t think he’s actually writing as he wanders around the Siberian shopping mall or in a meeting with his colleagues. I get what he’s trying to do, but again, just a little odd (to me, anyway).
As this is non-fiction, I have to state something that bothered my nitpicky self.
When Evagrius began his brain experiment he was standing naked and alone, up to his thighs in a freezing well of water. He was then coming up to forty years old, a tall man with dark hair, soulful eyes and a deep mellow voice.
Was Evagrius known for soulful eyes and a deep mellow voice? Was it documented somewhere? If so, great. Carry on. If not… well, no need to dramatize. For all we know, maybe he had crossed eyes and a nasal twang.
Anyway…. There is a lot of truth to be found in the seven deadly sins, even if you don’t adhere to the religion that they mostly represent. The examples he gives are pretty obscure (most of them, anyway), but that’s what makes it all the better. Some examples were gross (licking syphilitic patients or drinking pus water come to immediate mind), some were sad, like Doña Juana la Loca. They all had a point, though. And everything mentioned makes it clear that the medieval people (just like any age, really) had problems and struggled with the same issues we do. Differently, yes, but ultimately the same when you boil it down.
If you’re expecting a self help book that’s actually meant as a self-help book, this isn’t exactly that kind unless you don’t mind self-help through the lens of somewhat obscure history. If you’re expecting a book about history (like a history on how people self helped…themselves… in the Middle Ages) this isn’t exactly that kind, either. It’s somewhere down the middle.
I actually enjoyed reading this, and I feel like if a few things were different, I would have given it four stars. I still recommend it, especially for people who love medieval history, religious history, obscure facts, or learning about yourself (and the author) through the wonderful world of the seven deadly sins.
I reviewed this ARC for NetGalley, and the opinions here are my own.
3.5 but rounding down. I’ll be honest. I think, if the title had been something else, something a bit more telling regarding the seven deadly sins, I might have rounded up to 4. I feel like the title might be misleading to some people (possibly some of the other reviewers, after having read some of their reviews). I wasn’t expecting each chapter to represent a deadly sin. Not that I personally mind, but again, maybe a subtitle mentioning this might help (or repel) other readers.
The preface was a bit confusing and… jumbled. And I stared to wonder if this was more of a memoir or personal reflection journey. In a way, it is the author’s journey, but having read the whole thing, I can understand the reasoning a bit more. Still, once I got past that clustered beginning, I enjoyed the book, for the most part.
The writing is sometimes odd. The present tense parts are a little weird, considering I don’t think he’s actually writing as he wanders around the Siberian shopping mall or in a meeting with his colleagues. I get what he’s trying to do, but again, just a little odd (to me, anyway).
As this is non-fiction, I have to state something that bothered my nitpicky self.
When Evagrius began his brain experiment he was standing naked and alone, up to his thighs in a freezing well of water. He was then coming up to forty years old, a tall man with dark hair, soulful eyes and a deep mellow voice.
Was Evagrius known for soulful eyes and a deep mellow voice? Was it documented somewhere? If so, great. Carry on. If not… well, no need to dramatize. For all we know, maybe he had crossed eyes and a nasal twang.
Anyway…. There is a lot of truth to be found in the seven deadly sins, even if you don’t adhere to the religion that they mostly represent. The examples he gives are pretty obscure (most of them, anyway), but that’s what makes it all the better. Some examples were gross (licking syphilitic patients or drinking pus water come to immediate mind), some were sad, like Doña Juana la Loca. They all had a point, though. And everything mentioned makes it clear that the medieval people (just like any age, really) had problems and struggled with the same issues we do. Differently, yes, but ultimately the same when you boil it down.
If you’re expecting a self help book that’s actually meant as a self-help book, this isn’t exactly that kind unless you don’t mind self-help through the lens of somewhat obscure history. If you’re expecting a book about history (like a history on how people self helped…themselves… in the Middle Ages) this isn’t exactly that kind, either. It’s somewhere down the middle.
I actually enjoyed reading this, and I feel like if a few things were different, I would have given it four stars. I still recommend it, especially for people who love medieval history, religious history, obscure facts, or learning about yourself (and the author) through the wonderful world of the seven deadly sins.
I reviewed this ARC for NetGalley, and the opinions here are my own.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
History can be a bit of a downer sometimes. Every now and again, you need to break away for something just a bit more hopeful. For your next sad episode, why not get some much needed mental health advice from the middle ages? Yes, you heard me.
Turns our, the middle ages was not completely devoid of people trying to improve their emotional outlook. Peter Jones takes us on a delightful walk through medieval healthcare with Self-Help From the Middle Ages.
Jones found himself in Sibera (you won't believe this, ON PURPOSE), and it turns out he got a severe case of depression. While this is not shocking, Jones is a historian and decided he needed to do something about it. So he decided to research the seven deadly sins. This all makes sense once you read the book.
The narrative is a mix of memoir, historical research, and a smidge of self-help. Each aspect has its charms, but there are times where it doesn't feel seamless. The memoir parts will at times be a bit longer than needed, and the historical parts jump a bit from story to story. The self-help is usually a short write-up at the end of a chapter which I wish was much longer and in-depth. Overall, it's quite good, there are just a few places where you might find yourself reading faster to get to the next chapter.
(This book was provided as a review copy by Doubleday Books.)
Turns our, the middle ages was not completely devoid of people trying to improve their emotional outlook. Peter Jones takes us on a delightful walk through medieval healthcare with Self-Help From the Middle Ages.
Jones found himself in Sibera (you won't believe this, ON PURPOSE), and it turns out he got a severe case of depression. While this is not shocking, Jones is a historian and decided he needed to do something about it. So he decided to research the seven deadly sins. This all makes sense once you read the book.
The narrative is a mix of memoir, historical research, and a smidge of self-help. Each aspect has its charms, but there are times where it doesn't feel seamless. The memoir parts will at times be a bit longer than needed, and the historical parts jump a bit from story to story. The self-help is usually a short write-up at the end of a chapter which I wish was much longer and in-depth. Overall, it's quite good, there are just a few places where you might find yourself reading faster to get to the next chapter.
(This book was provided as a review copy by Doubleday Books.)
April 30, 2026
Beautifully written, though not remotely what I was expecting. This was much more solemn and thoughtful and reflective than the colorful, cartoony cover suggested to me. Incredibly insightful! Really chock full of facts and details about religion and philosophy and science in the middle ages, and how these methods of thought would have impacted and effected the daily lives of common people. I was really pleased by the generous treatment offered to humans of the past, the recognition that they were just as capable of rational thought as we are today, simply working from a different dataset. I just don't actually believe in sin, nor was I looking for advice on how to deal with some perceived flaw in my behaviors or outlook, so the actual moralizing and "self-help" at the core of the book ultimately didn't do anything for me. But the author clearly gained some genuinely valuable understanding by examining his personal struggles through this antiquated lens, and I'm sure others will, too.
May 13, 2026
This is an incredible book! Definitely going in my top reads of 2026! This book will leave you better intellectually than when you started reading it. This book allowed me to you live some of my favorite words of wisdom from various medieval philosophers and reminded me that medieval people went there a lot of the same inner tribulations as we do today but in some senses they also had better ways of dealing with sin and inner conflict. This book is extremely important and needed in todays world. Whether you were in medievalist or just someone that needs a new perspective and a pick me up this book is for you. I guarantee you'll close the book better and more enlightened and uplifted than when you started
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
DNF at 20%. This is absolutely not for me. This leans far closer to the "self help" than the "Middle Ages" portion of the title, and as someone who is unfamiliar with the self help genre (I get my self help from therapists, not armchair psychologists), this may be a perfectly fine example. The author continuously interjects his personal experiences and opinions to the point where I am unsure if this is a serious analysis of the historical texts or if it is just the author's feelings about them. It does seem to be well written with a great deal of feeling and humor, and I am sure that any faults I've found are due to my misunderstanding of what this book is about.
May 11, 2026
Een bijzonder verrijkende kijk op de wijze waarop de zeven hoofdzonden vanaf de renaissance een andere maatschappelijke invulling hebben gekregen, want oorspronkelijk waren het geen banbliksems die gepaard gingen met schuld en boete, maar wel sociale gedragsregels. Het hele systeem van de zeven hoofdzonden was eerst en vooral een sociaal systeem, ontworpen om antisociaal gedrag te beteugelen. Het is niet ontworpen om je zuiver te maken, of een beter mens. Het is ontworpen om een goede gemeenschap te creëren, een gemeenschap waarin we voor elkaar zorgen en met elkaar samenleven. Knap geschreven, bijzonder illustratief en met een persoonlijke invalshoek
May 3, 2026
This is part memoir, and Peter Jones does not have an everyday life, so that can be quite off-putting. That said, his understanding of the seven deadly sins in medieval Europe is excellent, and I am a huge fan of people showing how premodern people understand and interact with human conditions that modern people often deny them. Mental health issues are far from new - you just need to know where to look and how. For the religious person, the self help aspect may be more helpful than I personally found it.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Oh, I tried to get through this book! I do love history, yet this book by Peter Jones, was really difficult to get through. I made it half way and with apologies, gave up. For me, too analytical, too challenging and simply put, just did not hold my interest. I wanted to set it down and pick up a good harrowing novel. Thank you to Mr. Jones, however for his indelible research...It must have taken years!
April 18, 2026
I saw the title and knew I had to read this book! It's the best self-help book I've read in a long while; fresh and yet, reflecting the wisdom of past. I was a history major in college and I was surprised by the amount of history I learned from this book! Here you have wisdom of the middle ages using the seven deadly sins as a platform, punctuated with all kinds of history and a bit of memoir for good measure. Definitely worthwhile read!
April 30, 2026
A fresh run through the seven deadly sins with a Goldilocks amount of autoethnography; for every one personal narrative, there are three medieval examples, drawn from philosophy, art, history, lexicography, etc. Its most thorough moments are on pride, envy, and gluttony. The concluding pages are a very nice synthesis of the book's argument.
May 1, 2026
Self‑Help From the Middle Ages by Peter Jones is a light, engaging 3 stars. The concept is fun—mining medieval wisdom for modern life—and the tone is breezy. Some chapters land better than others, and the humour occasionally leans on the same beats, but it’s an easy, pleasant read with a few genuinely sharp insights.
May 7, 2026
Such an interesting, well written concept. This book drew me in right from the beginning and was so thought provoking. I have never been much interested in art, medieval or otherwise, but this gave me such an appreciation. Being able to see the meaning and having someone explain the nuance was fascinating. I feel privileged to have read this book.
April 25, 2026
Audiobook
An interesting look at history and perspective on “how to live” through the lens of the seven deadly sins and what they meant to people in the Middle Ages in contrast to what they mean to us now.
An interesting look at history and perspective on “how to live” through the lens of the seven deadly sins and what they meant to people in the Middle Ages in contrast to what they mean to us now.
May 12, 2026
3.5, but I rounded down because parts of it felt a little disjointed. Overall though, it was a fascinating read full of really interesting medieval history mixed in with representations of each seven deadly sin from the author's life.
Review of advance copy
DNF - got halfway and enjoyed! Just a fun history skim. Will be championing at the shop
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Part memoir, part history lesson, part self- help. I learned something about medieval times.
April 22, 2026
Superb
April 22, 2026
Absolutely phenomenal. One of those that makes you take a good look at your life in an appreciative, lovely way.
April 24, 2026
This was a fun listen! Some of the topics and examples from antiquity were *insane*!
April 25, 2026
3.65 rounded up
(gelezen in het Nederlands)
(gelezen in het Nederlands)
April 28, 2026
This was a really interesting book!
Read
April 30, 2026intriguing radio 4 book of the week. don't feel i give a star rating
May 7, 2026
This book was interesting and well-written, but I really can't endorse the book's premise of self-treating your depression using a medieval penitential.
May 9, 2026
Review TBA
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