About this Event
Self-Help from the Middle Ages
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
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 his book,Self-Help From the Middle Ages.
Helen Carr
Helen Carr is a historian and writer specialising in medieval history and public history. Her bestselling first book,The Red Prince, was aTimes andSunday Times Book of the Year. Her second book, an edited volume of essays titledWhat is History, Now?has become primary reading for history students and enthusiasts globally. Helen also works in podcasting, television and journalism and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a postgraduate researcher at Queen Mary University of London.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Blackwell's Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford, United Kingdom
GBP 6.00 to GBP 20.00
