Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life

by Grace Hamman

Traditional Christian virtue and vices 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, the 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.

Ask of Old Paths by Grace Hamman 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. It focuses on the ancient tradition of virtue language called the Seven Capital Virtue pride and humility, envy and love, wrath and meekness, avarice and mercy, sloth and perseverance, gluttony and abstinence, lust and chastity.

In accessible and thoughtful chapters, scholar and writer Grace Hamman shows how learning about these pairs of medieval 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Christian, History, Christian Living

224 pages, Hardcover

Published September 9, 2025

Reviews

[Mckinley Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully written book reminding us that the Christian life is not about rules to follow but about the people we become by growing in sacred virtues each and every day.

Also a reminder that the Middle Ages was a wildly weird time.

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the church historian in me, this is a fascinating read—beautifully written and I’ll give it high praise for familiarity with these medieval sources. But devoid of a gospel-centered framework, it would be easy to come away from this with a moralistic framework. As with reading many of the medieval writers, there is a lot of wise meat but you got to make sure to spit out the bones.