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Self-Help From the Middle Ages

A Journey Into the Medieval Mind

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Self-Help From the Middle Ages

By: Peter Jones
Narrated by: Peter Jones
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.



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

 Ethics & Morality Europe Medieval Personal Development Personal Success Philosophy Middle Ages Heartfelt

Critic reviews

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.
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.
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)
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