Preview: Master the medieval art of knowing yourself

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Today we're giving you a sneak peek of our new series of Life Lessons from History, in which David Musgrove explores how the past can help us live better, happier, healthier, and more productive lives today. In this episode, he's talking to Peter Jones to discover how the seven deadly sins were more a guide to practical self-knowledge than a list of religious prohibitions, and how medieval thinkers anticipated many modern ideas about well being. My name's Dave Musgrove and the concept of this podcast is simple. I find great historians and archaeologists and ask them to propose a lesson from history that might help us live happier, healthier, better or more productive lives today. And then we chat about it. It's the history well being crossover that you didn't know you needed.

But hopefully. you might enjoy. Peter. Welcome to the podcast. How are you? Pleasure to be here. Wonderful, yes. Thank you. Good. Thank you for coming. Seven Deadly Sins. What's that all about?

Well, look, you know, I think like we have this modern idea of the seven deadly sins, that they're this really forbidding system, like, you know, of things not to do. I was always interested in them. I'm medieval historian, right? And I've I've been studying the Middle Ages for I suppose about twenty years. Every book you read, a lot of the great classics of the Middle Ages, Chaucer, Dante, Gower, The seven deadly sins will come up, but I never really paid too much attention. And then I realized they connect everything. That's always interested me, you know, psych approaches to psychology, approaches to emotion in the past. Seven deadly sins are a tool, really, in the Middle Ages for Examining ourselves. They're not this kind of forbidding System that we kind of assume they are now. They're a uh a kind of periodic table of the mind. You know, these are the seven basic thoughts. They actually that was their original term, actually generic thoughts. We'll talk about that in a second. But then they're kind of basic patterns of thought that we all have.

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