Self-Help From the Middle Ages

A Journey Into the Medieval Mind

De: Peter Jones

Brought to you by Penguin.

When Dante called despair “the sin that freezes the heart,” was he describing the first burnout?
What can a painting by Giotto reveal about our hunger to see others fail?
Can desire ever lift us closer to wisdom, not drag us from it?

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.

© Peter Jones 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Reseñas de la Crítica

The Seven Deadly Sins 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 Traveller’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)

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)

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)

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)

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)