The first symptom of the gentrification of a neighborhood is the opening of a specialty coffee shop, a highly successful business thanks to the growing audience fleeing from the burnt torrefacto coffee served in bar glasses. The coveted raw material can come from Colombia, Nicaragua, or Ethiopia, be born from organic cultivation, and feature sophisticated packaging rivaling that of a perfume. Its quality is measured not only in flavor but also in other factors that really no one understands unless you practice that new profession of coffee sommelier, where traceability and acidity levels are discussed as if reciting hendecasyllables or rather with the precision of a doctor performing a colonoscopy. Another of the most representative characteristics of this trend is that a cup of this caffeine nectar is charged at the price of Iranian caviar.
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It turns out that, for a medieval monk, the consumer of premium coffee, the refined snob of contemporary poshness that proliferates so much in our cities as a sign of prosperity, is closer to gluttony than someone who eats a stew without blinking by order of servings or repeats endlessly at a Chinese buffet. Gluttony is not what we think, nor as David Fincher taught us in Seven during the first crime of the film that depicted an obese man forced to eat until bursting. In the Middle Ages, few privileged people could afford excess fat, and everyday poverty was the best Ozempic.
Only one of the five definitions of gluttony collected by the wise of that time refers to what we would understand today as greediness. The other four aim to censure those who eat very quickly; those who do so at inappropriate times; those who despise certain foods; and finally, the obsessive of exotic foods, as happened to King Henry I of England, fatally victimized by a craving for lamprey. Know then that for Gregory the Great, Alain de Lille, and Hugh of Saint Victor the bad sinner is the one who enters a trendy coffee shop and orders a Burundi coffee seasoned with notes of red fruits, citrus, and floral nuances.
The blame for translating these sins to the contemporary vibe lies with Peter Jones. This English medieval historian publishes Medieval Self-Help (Ed. Reservoir Books), an essay peppered with travel literature, memoirs, and above all, much research, in which he defends the following postulate: before mindfulness, there were monasteries.
“I felt the magic of these texts on me during a very difficult time; revisiting and discovering all these works helped me find many answers,” says Jones, a defender of a period of history unjustly labeled as dark and culturally irrelevant by popular culture, when universities were born and architecture, urbanism, and commerce were revolutionized.
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The meeting with Jones is in the Chamberí neighborhood of Madrid, the city where he lives with his family since he became a Marie Curie fellow at the Complutense University. He understands and speaks Spanish very well but requests the interview to be in English.
This author explores centuries of practical knowledge about depression, fear, grief, narcissism, and among other mental health lashes, anxiety. Not forgetting temptations, of course. The sources Jones has consulted in Rome, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, and Dublin include maps, medical treatises, lives of saints, and poems. In his research, he found advice and reflections to move forward in life by rescuing lost knowledge that has nothing to do with the inflexible morality we attribute to a 12th-century Benedictine or a Norman aspirant to sainthood. What emerges from the work is that its protagonists, like its readers, were fiercely human. It is detailed how elite theology reached the popular classes through oral storytelling in the form of tales or homilies and our ancestors’ devotion to lists to simplify complex concepts. So much so that they described pride in 12 steps, in the style of Alcoholics Anonymous; cataloged tears into five types and even compiled six signs of poisonous envy.
Medieval Self-Help was forged in a very cold place, where in winter temperatures reach -25 below zero. The story of this adaptation from Gothic ink to computer keyboard begins 6,000 kilometers from Madrid, in Tyumen, when Jones accepted a teaching position at the university of this Siberian city to which he moved with his wife and three-month-old son. The experience was positive at first. “We loved Siberia and Russia,” Jones admits. However, a better job opportunity made her, an Irishwoman, decide to settle in her country accompanied by their son. It seemed the moment for the family to return, but Jones chose to stay. “I loved being a History academic and feared that if I gave up, I would never get a university position again. It was a selfish decision, made to follow my passion wildly, which is medieval History. We pursue what we love and, one day, we realize that our obsession has actually made us unhappy.”
It was the in-depth study of the seven sins – pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, lust, and the mentioned gluttony – that shaped a course to attract his students to his love for the Middle Ages that finally pulled him out of the depression pit.
“Nowadays, when the seven deadly sins are mentioned, there is a feeling that they reflect something puritanical and prohibitive,” explains Jones. “They sound like a kind of punishment system designed to prevent us from having fun, but in the Middle Ages, it was not like that. This list was imposed as a way to reflect human personality, a tool, a mirror to understand who we are.”
This categorization, so loved by monks, is used by Jones, for example, to relate this code of conduct to the pagan cult of technology. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, proposed interpreting the role of many social networks as mechanisms that activate ancestral psychological impulses.
So, according to the canon of saints and intellectuals who lived with feudalism, Instagram represents pride; Facebook, envy; and Musk’s X, heir to Twitter, wrath. Sloth contaminates us through Netflix’s algorithm when it chooses which series to watch; LinkedIn, greed; and Yelp, the platform that allows rating businesses and restaurants, communicates with gluttony. It is not hard to imagine that Tinder embodies lust.
“If our medieval ancestors traveled to the present, they would value technology as a way to amplify our potential and also to take these sins to extremes,” says Jones. “I believe the lesson of the seven sins is not to eradicate them. It is not about living without pride, wrath, or envy. It is about channeling them, finding a way for them to work in our favor. In the Middle Ages, no one advocated completely getting rid of the ego. Thomas Aquinas himself considered that its total suppression made us pusillanimous, weak in spirit.”
“The lesson of the seven sins is not to eradicate them. It is about channeling them, finding a way for them to work in our favor.”
Peter Jones, historian
Self-help in the 21st century imported from the past has been in the hands of the Stoics thanks to the publicity of Silicon Valley magnates and influencers. Its most successful personification has been Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who went from starring in Gladiator to mindfulness superstar two thousand years after his death. The pop exploitation of his Meditations in reissues, podcasts, and memes are proof of this. Does Marcus Aurelius have a successor in the Middle Ages with the qualities to become the thinker in fashion?
“There is no doubt: Dante,” Jones opines. “No one better than him understood that you cannot be perfect nor is anyone. In the Divine Comedy, he is all of us when we reach a point where we ask what the meaning of life is. Marcus Aurelius is fun, but I don’t think reading him cures you or makes you feel spiritually fulfilled. I think, however, Dante is the author who has best written about how to get out of a crisis. Medieval self-help was not about reading a book and feeling better; it is about reading a book and finding a path that can help you, progressively, to improve.”
Through the pages of Medieval Self-Help appear fascinating characters such as Margery Kempe, who had 14 children and suffered a terrifying crisis from which she only recovered by traveling and living a life of extreme devotion; Evagrius Ponticus, the religious figure popular for his teachings on spiritual life who found the way after ruining a promising political career due to a sexual scandal; and among others, the mystic Isabel of Schönau, who lived a period of her life trapped by depression as a result of her asceticism and devised a therapy to reconnect with religiosity.
It is worth emphasizing that although Jones dialogues with the present through these characters, the fight against sin in that era left both very sophisticated behaviors and others very absurd. This is due to that medieval gene that sometimes resorted to outbursts that could be defined in our judgment as extreme. We have the case of Catherine of Siena, a Dominican who elevated fasting to the limit as a form of devotion and spiritual control – she fed on herbs and the pus of plague patients she cared for – and who in 2026 would have been closer to a clinic to treat anorexia than to canonization. Or Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, also a saint, who when he had a lustful thought towards a young lady decided that the best way to cool down was to throw himself into an icy lake in Burgundy, which almost cost him his life.
-What is the capital sin that best represents you?
-Pride. I am stubborn and closed-minded. I do my thing and don’t always listen to those around me…
Jones continues and makes a sincere self-examination reviewing the list. More like peccadilloes, which, as sinners we all are, we protect by sheltering him under the inviolability of the seal of confession.
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