“In the practice of virtues, we become more wholly human, more ourselves as images of God. The seven capital vices and their remedies are a medieval guide to our long and winding journey into communal and individual wholeness, because you can’t have one without the other.”
Grace Hamman, Ask of Old Paths
Welcome! Whether you’re a longtime friend or a new kindred spirit here (I recommend visiting the Village Green to get your bearings), I’m delighted to be a companion to you through the liturgical year.
This October marks our ONE YEAR anniversary of Hearthstone Book Club!! What a lifegiving, soul-deepening year of learning together. Peek back at our previous book selections & discussions to catch up or revisit some of the incredible books, authors, and co-readers we’ve shared this past year with!
Pax+bonum, Kristin.
Medievalist, author, and kindred spirit Dr.
has a real knack for speaking a language that I understand in a bone-deep way. Exhibit A, from Grace’s new book Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life:“Imagine yourself as a late fourteenth-century English person who celebrated the liturgical seasons of the medieval church.”
(I mean…how does she know?!)
Aside from somehow seeing my own idiosyncrasies so well, Grace manages bring the readers of Ask of Old Paths - however familiar or unfamiliar they are with the Middle Ages - into a deeply formational spirit1 of medieval thinking.
Crucially, though, Grace invites us into this imaginative space not for the purpose of pretending that we are somehow ‘medieval,’ not for contorting our modern lives into a false pretense…but, rather, to glean and graft forgotten expressions of theology into our day-to-day lives.
“I do not want to adopt these words wholesale, as if we were medieval ourselves, but to think with them, let them challenge me, and challenge them back. This book aims to tend to the language of the virtues, to give them back their life and color and otherworldly joy, by turning to medieval traditions of writing that have long been forgotten by all but scholars and confined to dusty corners of the library.”
And, after all, isn’t that why we study history and literature? Not for the sake of collecting data…but to truly have a thoughtful conversation with the past and investigate how these previous ways of thinking can impact out lives in the here-and-now.2
So, Grace takes us on a journey through a landscape of virtues and vices that - to the modern eye - have often become overly-familiar or quaint. We’ve lost a sense of how these words existed in the round…multi-dimensional, filled with nuance, and part of both literature and lived experience.
In the capital vices and their ‘remedies’ (the virtues), we find a framework that helps us to encounter our own habits with more honesty, meet our neighbors with more holy vulnerability, and greet God with gratitude.
“I constantly danced around the strangeness of words like avarice, meekness, sloth, and temperance. They were not strange in the sense that I had never seen them before or that I did not know what they meant to twenty-first-century readers. But in their context, in the medieval poetry and contemplative writing that fascinated me, these words took on outlandish new forms. They made different shapes in my mind as I read them. They were heavy in their power to capture beauty and ugliness, weirdness and desire.”
Grace offers the cultural backdrop that allows us to wrestle with the vibrant, challenging truth woven through medieval virtue theology, pairing each vice with its antidote…truly, a humbling contrast. (When seeing these virtues and vices paired, I’m honestly amazed by my tendency to completely miss or balk at the ‘remedies’ for my mis-aligned habits).
Ultimately, medieval virtue language describes the restoration embodied in Jesus, inviting us to live as participants…not spectators.
So far, I’m only a chapter into Ask of Old Paths…and I’m already filling up pages in my commonplace book with notes and left a somewhat-incoherent-but-very-excited voice message for Grace. After receiving this new book back in September, I (impatiently) waited to begin reading it until now, because I’m that excited to read it alongside all of you.
I hope you can join me this fall as we encounter Ask of Old Paths together…and I’m delighted to have Grace back again for a book club reunion!
, Ph.D. (Duke University) is a writer and independent scholar of late medieval poetry and contemplative writing. She is the author of Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life and Jesus through Medieval Eyes: Beholding Christ with the Artists, Mystics, and Theologians of the Middle Ages. Her work has been published by academic and popular outlets, including Plough Quarterly and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She lives near Denver, Colorado with her husband and three young children.
GATHERINGS
Everyone is invited to be in Book Club! All subscribers can share their questions and thoughts in the HF Chat and in the comments thread here.
Additionally, paid members can join for live online gatherings - including a discussion with the author herself!
Fall Book Club Gatherings:
LIVE DISCUSSIONS
For paid members.
Details and a Google Meet link will be sent the week of each discussion, and a reminder (with link) will be posted in Chat. If you can’t make it to these gatherings live, no worries; they’ll be recorded and posted for you to watch on the re-play.
Wednesday, October 15 at 5 pm Pacific Time
Join me for a relaxed gathering to open up our time in Grace’s book together! Let’s wassail one whole year of book club together.Saturday, November 15 at 2 pm Pacific Time - WITH THE AUTHOR
Author Grace Hamman will be joining us to chat about her book!
SUBSTACK CHAT
For all subscribers.
As you read, feel free to hop into our Chat space to discuss with other subscribers!
GIVEAWAY
To enter to win Grace’s book, please read this bit of nitty-gritty…
The giveaway includes a hardbound copy of Ask of Old Paths
Giveaway is open to all subscribers of Hearthstone Fables and Grace Hamman’s Medievalish
Paid subscribers’ entries count as 5 entries
Open to worldwide shipping
This giveaway is not sponsored by Substack; many thanks to Zondervan for sending me two copies of this book…one of which will be gifted to a subscriber!
…and then leave a comment below with one question you’d like to ask the author.
Giveaway closes on Saturday, October 18 at 10 am Pacific Time, and a winner will be chosen at random.
Find a copy of Grace’s new book via her web site:
I’m so grateful for the support of book club over this past year…thank you for bringing your curiosity, insights, excitement, and wisdom. I’ve learned so much, and it’s a treat getting to share in these impactful books with others.
Pax et bonum,
Kristin
READ ON
One of the most impactful books that led me to medieval theology was Etienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy - highly recommend!
When I was in college, I took a class - which was part of the history department - on 19th c. American Transcendentalism. One of our ongoing assignments was to journal through the texts, and when my professor handed back my first round of journals, he said (shocked): “I’ve never really seen anyone engage with this on a personal level…usually, it’s just dry history.” (This is not to say anything special about me - but rather, to say that the way we classify things…i.e. ‘history department’…tends to impact how personally or impersonally we engage with material).
I cannot believe it has been a year since we were reading Winters in the World together!!
Unfortunately I expect to have a fresh baby on November 15, so I will likely not be able to ask Grace my question in real time – I would love to pose a quandary with which I often wrestle myself, viz. how do we discern which "old paths" are the ones we should hearken to for deepening our relationship with Christ (e.g. the liturgical year, certain expressions of virtue) and which are "inapplicable" or at best, unhelpful (e.g. certain attitudes toward nature and creation which would be considered, both by Christian and scientific standards of this day and age, superstitious).
Yay!! I was hoping this would be the book! I have a copy so I won’t enter the giveaway. I will definitely be thinking of questions for Grace!