Special New Year Edition

...yay

Dear friend,

You may be wondering why a Medievalish showed up in your inbox today. After all, it normally arrives only once a month, at an obscenely early morning hour on the twelfth. It’s because I am impatient. I was going to wait until this month’s newsletter, but I really wanted to start off my 2025 posts with a bang. Happy New Year! Some medieval birds for joy and peace in your 2025, first of all, just because I’m incredibly charmed by these margins:

Aren’t they the best? I saw a lot of mallards and quail (though of the desert variety) this Christmas in Phoenix. 1390-1400 Lombardy Hours of Isabella of Castile. Added Decoration, Spain 1475-1500. National Library of the Netherlands. http://manuscripts.kb.nl/show/manuscript/76+F+6

But now down to business: I WROTE A SECOND BOOK with Zondervan Reflective! It’s called Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life. And here is the beautiful cover:

If my first book, Jesus through Medieval Eyes, looked at answers to Jesus’s question to Peter, “Who do you say I am?” through medieval perspectives on the character and person of Christ, Ask of Old Paths asks the natural follow-up questions: “Who are we called to be as people following Jesus? What does the life of wholeness look like as a creature of God?” Our language around the life of wholeness and holiness is essential to our understanding of how we might follow Christ.

Traditional Christian virtue and vice words like abstinence, gluttony, and sloth make many of us bored or uncomfortable. At their best, these words sound dead or confusing, like incomplete fossils that belong to a distant past awkwardly enshrined in a museum. At worst, they signify a prejudiced past, when these words were wielded like weapons.

Yet in medieval writing, this language of the virtues and vices was powerful, lively, and delightfully weird. Patience is described as a peppercorn. Unicorns preach chastity. Knightly virtues fend off devious vices by throwing roses at them. In medieval books, words like avarice and meekness meant different things and carried different weight than they do today. And great medieval preachers and poets taught the virtues as crucial to what it meant to live a life of holiness, right alongside the Lord's Prayer and the Creed.

In a world without fashion magazines, gluttony and abstinence were framed differently. In an age before capitalism and global markets, the consequences of avarice were clearer. And because the virtues and vices were taught alongside central tenets of the church like the creeds, prayers, and sacraments, medieval writers and artists used literary and artistic images creatively and strangely in ways meant to aid ordinary people, not just philosophers or the especially holy.

Ask of Old Paths meditates upon those strange and wonderful word-pictures and explanations of virtues and vices found in medieval traditions of poetry, sermons, and treatises long confined to dusty corners of the library. My book focuses on the ancient tradition of virtue language called the Seven Capital Virtue Remedies. In this ancient tradition, a virtue acts as “remedy” to one of the seven capital vices, illuminating the nature and character of both virtue and vice: pride and humility, envy and love, wrath and meekness, avarice and mercy, sloth and fortitude, gluttony and abstinence, lust and chastity.

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, the conclusion of the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer paraphrased Jeremiah 6:16: “Standeth upon the ways, and seeth and asketh of old paths (that is to say, of old teachings) which is the good way, and walketh in that way, and ye shall find refreshing for your souls.” In Ask of Old Paths, I ask of these old paths which is the good way, and invite readers alongside my own wrestling with the vices and rejoicing with the virtues. It’s not that we adopt these ways of considering the virtues and vices wholesale, but that these pairs of virtues and vices can help us reevaluate our own washed out and insipid moral vocabulary in modernity. Our imaginations for the good life are expanded; our longing for sanctification sharpens. Old ideas can give us new fire in our practice of the virtue—and in that practice, we imitate Jesus and become more human.

I am so, so excited to share this labor of love with you. You can use your Christmas gift cards to preorder the book—of course preorders always help authors! But as it doesn’t come out until the beginning of September, I will remind you again in a few months about this project and won’t be excessively mentioning it until then. Here are a few links if you wish to preorder now rather than later: Amazon, Thriftbooks, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org. But you’ll be waiting quite a while for your book to arrive in the mail 😂.

Peace and joy to you all in 2025,

Grace