The Seven Deadly Sins

What mistake did Narcissus make when he looked into the water? To fall in love with his own ravishing self, we might think. But to the medieval mind, that wasn’t his problem at all. In John Gower’s 14th-century poem ‘Confessio Amantis’, Narcissus falls in love all right – but with someone else entirely. His fault isn’t that he loves himself; it’s that he doesn’t even recognise himself. Then, as now, as Peter Jones argues in this revelatory exploration of late medieval psychology, the path to self-betterment went through self-knowledge. Like our own, it was ‘a civilisation geared towards understanding the human mind’. But whereas the tools we use today are