Peter Jones joins us in conversation with Suzi Feay to discuss his latest book, Self-Help in the Middle Ages.
In this bold and original history, Jones explores how the Middle Ages understood the Seven Deadly Sins not as a list of vices, but as a map of the mind — a practical guide to living well. Drawing on poems, confessions of espionage, paintings, and unpublished manuscripts, he reveals a rich and complex moral psychology that feels urgently relevant to modern struggles with depression, narcissism, rage, and addiction.
What can a twelfth-century monk teach us about burnout, envy, or despair? Far more than we might imagine. 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. Wise, surprising, and deeply humane, Self-Help in 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 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 this book.