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Self-Help From the Middle Ages

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What to expect

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

Critics Review

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
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, author of A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRITAIN 1066-1485
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, author of HOW TO LIVE LIKE A MONK
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, author of CULPABILITY
This book is brimming with exceptional insight into the lives and minds of medieval people, but it also offers a glimpse into the magic of a historian’s practice. Personal and deeply thoughtful, it is an ode to medieval history and its possibilities in the modern day.
Helen Carr, author of SCEPTRED ISLE
Historian Jones debuts with an illuminating and eclectic survey of how medieval thinkers grappled with perennial psychological challenges through the framework of the seven deadly sins ... Throughout, the author interweaves colorful details of medieval therapies with a compassionate commentary on how the “most intimate struggles of our lives” are part of a quest to understand the human condition that’s existed for nearly as long as humanity itself. This captivates.
Publishers Weekly, starred review
Funny and profound. Offers help from across the ages to very modern concerns. A mind cleanse and an antidote to Instagram, it makes us feel relieved we’re all human after all. A great book.
Xand van Tulleken, author of MAKE ME WELL

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