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.

Author Biography

Peter Jones is a writer and historian who first fell under the spell of the Middle Ages at the age of 9, while visiting the National Portrait Gallery in London. After growing up in the circle of towns around Heathrow Airport he moved to New York in his early twenties, and received a PhD in Medieval History from NYU. Over his career he has taught at the University of Toronto, University College London, and Complutense University of Madrid. Peter also spent several years working at the School of Advanced Studies in Tyumen, Siberia, and his experiences there — especially the class he taught on the Seven Deadly Sins — inspired his book, Self-Help From the Middle Ages.

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