Historian Peter Jones’s autobiographical Self-Help from the Middle Ages starts with an intriguing premise. Feeling depressed and burnt out one Siberian winter, he turns not to antidepressants or psychotherapy, but to medieval thought. Could the great old philosophers, part of a culture that above all prized introspection and moral systematisation, help him dig his way out of his low mood? Of course they could.

In medieval Christian terms, Jones was suffering from acedia, or sloth, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. What he needed was less self-pity, more compassion and to rekindle his love for all that he used to care about. As the 14th-century saint Catherine of Siena would have said, he had to climb up to the higher rungs of her ladder of tears. Crying from self-pity, as in sloth, produces the lowest kind of tears; next come tears of recognising and regretting the bad things that we have done to others; then tears of compassion for ourselves and others; followed by tears of a loving awareness of how all humans suffer; and finally the tears of peace, of love for the whole universe with all its faults. Jones doesn’t say if he learned to cry this last kind of tears, but he has clearly fallen back in love with life and with the Middle Ages.

Rebranding the Seven Deadly Sins as secular self-help is a stroke of writing genius, and the book contains no small amount of wisdom. Before this project, Jones saw the Seven Deadly Sins as a ‘bit of a joke’, known to him from ice creams, graphic novels and Hollywood serial killers.