Peter Jones

Because priests need handbooks.

My God, right, I've got to make all of these confessions.

I've got hundreds and hundreds of parishioners.

I need a guidebook.

So guidebooks get written.

And these guidebooks often have the seven deadly sins right at the heart.

You know, this is the core template.

There's a theologian who was asked in the 1200s by a group of women who came to him, theologians called Raoul, and these women say, give us moral advice.

He turns straight to the seven deadly sins.

Okay, here's your template.

Let's start with pride, then envy, then anger.

So they become the structuring framework for all kinds of discussions about people's well-being, people's morality.

So then we have all these handbooks, and you go to any library in Europe, any archive of medieval manuscripts, open any manuscript at random, the chances are you're going to see the Seven Deadly Sins somewhere there.

Honestly, I know that sounds bizarre.

Scrawled in the margins, I found treatises on the Seven Deadly Sins used as the binding for manuscripts.

There must have been so many of these texts that you could just say, okay, we'll use one of those.

They just burst in popularity.

We also have preaching.

So we have preachers giving sermons on, and that becomes more and more popular in the 1200s.

And so many of these sermons, the words that come up over and over again, pride, envy, lust, avarice.