“Medieval psychology” might sound nearly a millennium out of date, irrelevant to modern science, with its reassurances of cognitive data and peer-reviewed studies. But we often say that Shakespeare’s 400-year-old plays communicate the human condition, and that wouldn’t be possible if the Bard didn’t have a deep understanding of what makes our minds tick. Rewind the clock just 200 years further and you’ll find, with the help of a Middle English glossary, that the autobiographical writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe—not to mention Chaucer—seem achingly familiar in their yearning, their humor, and their determination. We’re not so different, mentally, from our forebears, and beyond literature, medieval writings on morality and psychology have a lot to offer us. But since cracking open a vellum manuscript to read cramped Latin text is beyond most of us, historian Peter Jones can be our guide in his new book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages. And the starting point for much medieval guidance on living a better life is quite familiar: the Seven Deadly Sins, which were less a catalog of forbidden behaviors than a path to self-knowledge. Just ask Dante.
Go beyond the episode:
- Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living
- For more about medieval women’s religious experience of food, you can’t do better than Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast
- Guillaume de Deguileville’s The Pilgrimage of Human Life, in scanned manuscript or translation
- Bernard of Clairvaux’s The Steps of Humility and Pride
- Thomas Aquinas’s works are available online in a free side-by-side translation
- Don’t sleep on the early Christian mystics: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Catherine of Siena
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