The Wandering Mind

“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 - The 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.’ Ms. Kreiner, a professor of medieval history at the University of Georgia, also shares intriguing perspectives on our own values and priorities… [The Wandering Mind] focuses on more than the past, and its implications demand our attention.” – Dominic Green - The Wall Street Journal”…compelling, beautifully written and often amusing.” – Anna Katharina Schaffner - The Times Literary Supplement

Jamie Kreiner is a historian of the early Middle Ages and associate professor of history at the University of Georgia. Her work on the early Middle Ages examines the politics, ethics, and scientific sensibilities of those underappreciated centuries. She lives in Athens, Georgia.