It is a malfunction of the heart, said the 13th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
His wasn’t the only evocative descriptions of burnout.
Some medieval writers called it the “noonday demon”, or the urge to take one’s hand off the plough. Others likened it to standing helpless and unmoving in a river, as the water rushed past one’s legs.
Elisabeth, a Benedictine nun in 12th-century Germany, wrote in her memoir that she had always loved being a nun. Until one day
It is a malfunction of the heart, said the 13th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
His wasn’t the only evocative descriptions of burnout.
Some medieval writers called it the “noonday demon”, or the urge to take one’s hand off the plough. Others likened it to standing helpless and unmoving in a river, as the water rushed past one’s legs.
Elisabeth, a Benedictine nun in 12th-century Germany, wrote in her memoir that she had always loved being a nun. Until one day when she turned up to mass and was unable to sing. Back in her cell, she tried to read but couldn’t get through a page. “I felt like I was walking in shadows in comparison to the light I used to experience,” she wrote, in a passage that feels oddly familiar today.
A key difference between then and now, says medieval historian Peter Jones, is that people thought of burnout as quite normal.
It was considered an element of sloth, one of the seven deadly yet very human sins. “And because people believed these sins affected us all equally, there was no stigma around this affliction,” Jones says. “It was just as human as a burst of anger, or eating too much at breakfast.”
His book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages: A Journey into the Medieval Mind (2026), offers a fascinating glimpse into how medieval scholars and writers tackled this loss of purpose and momentum.
How did they tackle it? Living a good life is not a sprint, the 12th-century theologian Bernard of Clairvaux said.
Jones says he likes to think of life as an ultramarathon, over mountains and valleys, ice and sand. “Of course, we’ll stumble sometimes. Of course, we’ll slow down, and occasionally have to stop,” he adds. “Perhaps a burnout is an inevitable phase in any good life.”
Excerpts from an interview.
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* We tend to think of burnout as a feature of the modern world. Yet it goes even further back than the medieval era…
Evagrius Ponticus, a 4th-century Greek writer, quit his political career in his 30s and wandered into the Egyptian desert to live as a monk, because he felt the need to get back in touch with who he had been, before ambition took over his life.
Today, we define burnout as a sense of overload. A period when, through a combination of pressure and fatigue, a pile-up of unfinished work and deadlines, we become unable to cope.
In the 1180s, people such as the anonymous European known as the Archpoet were already writing about the despondency that comes from too much work stress. The core element of modern-era burnout — the self-directed pressure to be better — also seems to have been felt in these eras.
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* How differently did the medieval world understand the roots of burnout?
Although they would still recognise the role of workplace pressure, they wouldn’t necessarily fixate on that. The larger issue they’d see would be obsession, namely the self-obsession that pushes us to be brighter, better, stronger or more “productive”.
For medieval theologians, obsession was the line where ordinary human behaviour crossed over into deadly sin. Eating was normal; the obsession with eating became gluttony, and so on.
So, although it is difficult, the medieval remedy for something like burnout would be to dial back the obsession and try to get in touch with the simpler things that first made us love this life or career that is now wearing us out.
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* Who are some of the figures of the past we could look to for inspiration on this front?
The 15th-century English mystic Margery Kempe is a hero of medieval burnout.
After her 14th child was born, she had what was likely a breakdown. She even bit the flesh of her left hand, leaving a permanent scar. In her writings, she berated herself for never being kind enough, strong enough or loving enough. But Margery found hope by holding on.
She wrote The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography in the English language, in the 1430s, and the process put everything in perspective. She writes of how it taught her to be self-aware, not just self-critical, and to be thankful for the life she had lived, rather than the “perfect” life she never had.
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* How has your own understanding of the self, burnout or recovery changed after this book?
The medieval sins have taught me to be more patient and self-aware. But most of all, they’ve taught me to forgive the darker side of myself.
Sometimes, it feels like our 21st-century world wants us to be perfect.
The best medieval guides didn’t advise a life without sin. Eradicating lust or gluttony or pride was impossible, theologians said, because these were some of the things that made us human. Eliminate them and we would no longer be human; we would be angels.
Instead, medieval self-help took a gentler approach. The recovery plan was first to recognise and accept all seven sins as existing in us. Next, to find a way to push them away from excess and obsession, towards something that could do us and others some good. And then to repeat this, over and over again.
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* If you could bring one medieval writer into the present day, to help us all, who would you choose?
I would bring back Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). The Italian diplomat was an extraordinary woman. When her sister died, she withdrew into a terrible grief. But she managed to then shift her focus to bigger things, setting up a plague hospital, advising popes on religious policy and writing spiritual treatises, all while still in her 20s.
To live our best lives, she said, we have to get over our self-pity. But it isn’t enough to pity society’s unfortunates either. It’s all of humanity we need to cry for. We are all on board this ship together, and we sail or sink together.
That was the spirit of Catherine, and it is also the undying spirit of medieval self-help.
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