The Wandering Mind
What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction
It is easy to imagine that our constant state of distractedness is peculiar to the digital age, but distraction has been a concern in every era—perhaps never more so than for Christian monks living in Ireland, Iran, and the places in between, from 300 to 900 CE. Though they quit the world for lives of seclusion, monks still struggled to concentrate, and they came to perceive distraction as a fundamental problem.
As Jamie Kreiner argues in The Wandering Mind, we are obsessed with distraction today in large part because they were. Exploring the sophisticated techniques they developed in their endless quest to concentrate—from unforgiving sleep regimens to massive meditational construction projects—Kreiner demonstrates that their insights, remarkably, can still be useful to us now.
Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty account of human fallibility that bridges a distant era and our own.
Published by Liveright Books
Praise for The Wandering Mind
[Kreiner is] a wry and wonderful writer. In The Wandering Mind she eschews nostalgia, rendering the past as it really was: riotously strange yet, when it comes to the problem of attention, annoyingly familiar . . . Kreiner is fascinating on the ways monks attempted to manipulate their memories and remake their minds, and on the urgency they brought to those tasks, knowing the dangers that lurked even if they eliminated all physical temptations.
― Casey Cep, The New Yorker
A life of prayer and seclusion has never meant a life without distraction. As Jamie Kreiner puts it in her new book, ‘The Wandering Mind,’ the monks of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (around A.D. 300 to 900) struggled mightily with attention….Charming. . . [Kreiner uses] the cultural obsession with distractibility to train our focus elsewhere, guiding us from the starting point of our own preoccupations to a greater understanding of how monks lived.
― Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
A lucid and vivid examination of how early Christian monks created habits of contemplation to ‘connect their minds to God,’ opening ‘panoramic vistas of the universe that transcended both space and time.’ ….’The Wandering Mind’ focuses on more than the past, and its implications demand our attention.
― Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal
As Kreiner elaborates in this smartly readable book, people who engage in exertions of concentration have likely been dealing with distraction forever…. the refined effort of attention was, as Kreiner winningly puts it, ‘a paradox of states and scales,’ seeking a broader vista by narrowing focus… This is ultimately an intensely inner struggle, and it’s a testament to Kreiner’s narrative skills that she manages to keep things so interesting . . . The Wandering Mind is an oddly cheering reminder that this persistence can yield results.
― Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review
Unless you have phenomenal self-control, distraction is probably something that you’re contending with on a regular basis . . . Jamie Kreiner’s new book offers an unexpected point of reference for this nominally-modern condition: monks living hundreds of years ago. How they experienced and contended with distraction might surprise you; it could also be the key to a less distracted 2023.
― Tobias Carroll, InsideHook
Trying to eliminate distraction? Historian Kreiner looks in the archives at how medieval monks worked to find focus―and at what we can learn from them.
Tackling the timeless theme of distraction, Kreiner, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, explores what the behavioral habits of medieval Christian monks can teach the modern world. . . [The Wandering Mind] uses a wide array of primary sources spanning the entirety of medieval Christendom, creating a pleasantly readable result. Good proof that the problem of distraction is nothing new.
― Kirkus Reviews
University of Georgia history professor Kreiner … examines how medieval Christian monks dealt with distraction in this fascinating history . . . Meticulously detailed and surprisingly accessible, [The Wandering Mind] lends new insight into one of the oldest human preoccupations. Readers will be enlightened.
― Publishers Weekly
In elaborating the complicated, human battles that medieval monks waged for control over their own minds, Jamie Kreiner provides a compelling call to address our current distracted moment with both more seriousness and more humility. ―Cal Newport, New York Times best-selling author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work
Magnificently learned, charmingly written, and deeply humane, Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering Mind takes us into the living heart of the Christian ascetic movement in its first centuries. … Seldom has so profound a revolution in the distant past been presented with such verve and understanding, and with so lively a sense of the continued relevance of its hard-won discoveries to our hectic world. ―Peter Brown, Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus, Princeton University