Peter Jones

They're all in hell.

But the rest of us, I hope I count myself, are in purgatory.

No matter how good you are, no matter how moral you were in your life, all the great things you did, your moral mission, you still have to purge yourself of those seven deadly sins.

So in Dante's purgatory,

It moves up the mountain, you've purged yourself of your pride with big rocks on your back and then envy, have your eyelids stitched together.

So the message of that is all of us have to work on these constantly and that work is never done.

The seven deadly sins are with us until we die and then we still have to work on them.

I think the 1300s, absolutely.

They are everywhere.

They're in church walls.

They're in little frescoes.

Giotto paints them in the Arena Chapel.

They're wonderful paintings of the sins.

We have Dante, of course, Purgatorio in the 1310s.

And then by the end of that century, we have Chaucer and someone like John Gower, who structures his Confessio Romantis all around the seven deadly sins.

So the 1300s are the high point.

They're everywhere.

You can't pick up a great work of literature without seeing the sins in there.

Tough century, 1300s as well.

I mean, you know, a lot going on.