Scott here with another episode of the History on Plug podcast.

When medieval historian Peter Jones found himself falling into depression while teaching at a Siberian university, with icicle sprouting around his eyelashes and 40 below weather, he asked himself what a medieval sufferer would do.

And he found out something interesting.

The Middle Ages, for all its reputation as a dark and superstitious time, where the answer to

every health problem was leeches, was actually the golden age of self-help.

A medieval merchant, consulting a priest about melancholia, what they called depression, would

receive diagnosis, confession, and penance based on the seven deadly sins, a psychological framework that mapped the seven basic patterns of human thought

long before modern psychiatry existed. What we think of as a simplistic ethical model was

actually an intricate system for understanding behavior, so much so that Reed Hoffman,

founder of LinkedIn, credited it for his social media success by mapping

each sin to platforms. Tinder on lust, Yelp on Glutney, LinkedIn on greed, Netflix on Sloth,

Twitter and anger, Facebook on envy, and Instagram on pride.

Today's guest is Peter Jones, author of Self-Help from the Middle Ages,

what the seven deadly sins can teach us about living.

We discuss how a 4th century Egyptian monk

of Agrius Ponticus formulated eight what he called wicked thoughts to help monks identify

psychological roots of temptation, why Pope Gregory the Great consolidated them into seven sins

in the 6th century, and how the 1215 Lateran Council made yearly confession mandatory,

transform intellectual theory

into practical psychology for the masses. This looks at how time-tested systems are often the most

practical, and I hope enjoy this discussion with Peter Jones. And one more thing before we

get started with this episode, a quick break for a word from our sponsors. One of the fastest,

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