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Self-Help From the Middle Ages

What Medieval History Can Teach Us About Living a Happy, Healthy Life

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Self-Help From the Middle Ages

Von: Peter Jones
Gesprochen von: Peter Jones
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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.
'A lovely book' PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads
'One of the most compelling medieval history books I have ever read' IAN MORTIMER, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to the Medieval England
'‘Funny and profound ... a great book.' XAND VAN TULLEKEN, doctor, broadcaster and host of What's Up Docs?
'Brimming with exceptional insight' HELEN CARR, author of Sceptred Isle
‘Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived’ BRUCE HOLSINGER, author of Culpability

© Peter Jones 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Europa Mittelalter Persönliche Entwicklung Persönlicher Erfolg Philosophie
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The history is first- rate. Jones is a thoughtful, well- travelled scholar with a hugely impressive command of archival material across Europe. He is also an astute art historian and a good storyteller with an eye for a killer image.
An enthralling book … the history of emotions can be a difficult field, but with the seven deadly sins, Jones has the perfect framework to communicate the intangible. While the subject matter can be weighty, the overall effect is that of a fun conversation with a scholar who had an encyclopaedic knowledge and knows how to make it relatable. (Seb Falk)
Peter Jones’s funny, exhilarating book shows that our ancestors were just like us — but wiser ... His scholarship is as deep as the Mariana Trench, but he bears it like thistledown. He is never pompous, and his book is funny, informative, even optimistic. It seems that our ancestors really were very like us, only a good deal wiser. We could learn a lot from them, and this is the perfect place to start.
A moving, eloquent and important book, reclaiming centuries of subtle psychological thought, and with it the emotional lives of our medieval ancestors, from the permafrost of modern contempt.
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 TRAVELLER'S GUIDE TO MEDIEVAL ENGLAND)
A thoughtful exploration of medieval ideas - and how they can illuminate a modern life. A lovely book in which personal reflections and historical insights from the Middle Ages are woven together to look at emotion, desire and self-understanding. (Peter Frankopan, author of THE SILK ROADS)
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)
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