Garden Gone Wild
A Feature Review of
Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life
Grace Hamman
Hardcover: Zondervan, 2025
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ] [ Audible ]
Reviewed by Maggie Wills
In college, I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and peeked in the research room. I saw the largest collection of Shakespeare’s works and a First Folio on exhibit. Years later, I traveled to Shakespeare’s childhood home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Everything in his birthplace harkened back to the 16th century—furniture, wallpaper, bedding. I explored the house and saw where Shakespeare’s father crafted gloves. I learned the glove-making process. The proprietors composed Shakespeare’s Henley Street home to help visitors experience his life there. I feel grateful for my visit to the Folger (and would go back in a heartbeat). But walking through his home changed the way I understood and read him. Museums display history, but, for me, the immersion of a heritage home brings history to life (even if it is a re-creation of history). Seeing history up close revives my imagination. In her new book, Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life, Grace Hammann (PhD, Duke University) takes readers to the Medieval heritage home of virtue and vice.
The book takes Medieval virtues and vices out from behind glass cases. When they come to mind, virtues and vices might make us think of a strict list of dos and don’ts. Yes, yes, we know that we need to be more patient with our family or less prideful at work. We do our best to acquiesce. Other virtues (our understanding of them, at least) offend us. We see our culture abuse virtues like chastity and meekness so often that we feel jaded towards them. So, like children eager to get back to playtime, we nod along at these concepts and rush away. Hamman takes readers on a tour of how people in the Middle Ages saw and experienced virtues and vices. Pastors, poets, artists, and laypeople from the Middle Ages explored them with weight and used strange images to describe them. Medieval people viewed mercy as a pillow and avarice as a greedy hedgehog. They imagined chastity as a unicorn pursued by hunters craving its magical horn. Ask of Old Paths delights in this medieval perspective. Hamman takes readers on a tour of the Medieval virtues and vices. She explores the good, the bad, and the strange. In Ask of Old Paths, Hamman revives the nature of virtues and vices, helps readers imagine them with old language (new to us), and connects our present with the richness of times long past.
Hamman tells readers what seeking virtue gifts us with and what the journey could feel like. The book reminds readers that virtues and vices reflect habits and practices. These lead to wholeness or destruction. The path we venture on when we follow the virtues leads to Christlike holiness for our body, our soul, and our neighbors. Virtues matter because they reconcile these vital parts of life. Vices divide and destroy them. We don’t venture out without any hope in mind at what we might find. We go with purpose. Hamman roots readers in this wholeness as the purpose for virtue. She also reawakens the practices and habits of virtues with old images new to us. The image of a garden appears in Ask of Old Paths from beginning to end. Medieval people likened the soul to a garden gone wild (xiv). Jesus cultivates this garden, and we find virtues, strange plants, growing in its midst. Hamman says the virtues in it “are so beautiful partially because the saints who live them share nothing in common but the greatness of their love. This is the creativity of the virtues” (200). Leave the rulebook inside. Walk in a strange, diverse garden of virtue and find unique and beautiful plants and weeds along its paths. This picture helps invigorate a desire for virtue. Hamman and the medieval writers help readers picture the dynamic nature of living out and loving virtue.
Ask of Old Paths gives readers new pictures for virtues and vices that stretch the imagination. Chaucer, for example, describes humility as the moon. The moon “gloriously illuminates the night, yet it borrows all its light from the sun. It has no light of its own” (37-38). This image offers readers a picture of what it looks like to have a proper sense of our abilities and gifts. Like the moon, we don’t possess glory in our own right, but God gives us the gifts to reveal his glory. The images in the book reveal the essence of the virtues and make them memorable to readers. Hamman also uses a collection of images to describe patience. William Auvergne, a medieval bishop and theologian, personifies patience. He writes, “She is like a hammered gold vessel: If the misshapen gold knew its maker, knew what it was about to become, it would welcome the contortion and flames” (89). Patience is also like a peppercorn, crushed to flavor a dish. And like wheat ground into bread. The medieval images capture the weight of patience and the newness that it births. These descriptions of patience engage all our senses. Envy, in medieval minds, was like a basilisk. The massive snake “desires another’s holy green to crackle and stiffen in death” (55). In this example, the vice becomes strange and fearsome. The medieval imagery removes the black and white, definitional basis we give virtues and vices. They replace this with colorful illustrations that reveal vivid beauty and darkness.
But the book doesn’t leave readers in the past. It brings the past to our present circumstances. Along with medieval views, Hamman offers her own insights on virtues as they relate to life today. With a deliberate and gracious voice, Hamman pastors the reader towards virtue in daily living. Readers can see this right away. Each chapter concludes with a “Practices and Prayer” section. This section provides Scripture, questions, further reading, and a written prayer for each virtue and vice. The book strays from claiming medieval people had a right or better view of the world. Hamman calls one medieval source “colorful and questionable”. The book invites questions and recognizes strangeness in the medieval ideas. It also acknowledges how modern culture has abused virtue language. The powerful should embrace meekness. Chastity involves more than good sexual behavior. Hamman points out the good, bad, and strange of both modern and medieval ideas. She sifts through, without ignoring, old and new errant ways of thinking.
Hamman also invites readers to the beauty of virtues in the world around us. When discussing abstinence, knowing when to feast and when to fast, she pauses to describe a scene. She passed a group of teenage girls with a jug of lemonade and armfuls of books. She writes, “the joyful, quiet girls in a line reminded me of a procession, nearly sacramental in its serious pursuit of embodied joy. The lemonade in its ugly pitcher might as well have been the sacrament itself” (160). This moment prompts readers to look for embodied virtues and vices in our backyards and workplaces. Ask of Old Paths flows with reminders of God’s grace to give and reveal virtues to us and those who came before us.
In an introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, C. S. Lewis advocates for reading Christian classics. According to Lewis, we should “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” Ask of Old Paths demonstrates this idea. Medieval virtues and vices—jotted down in sermons, poems, scholarship, and stories—whisk the sea breeze our way. The breeze leaves readers refreshed. And wondering what other old paths might be worth treading.
Maggie Wills
Maggie Wills grew up in the Alpharetta, Georgia trying to keep track of all six of her brothers. She graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary with her Master of Arts in Media Art and Worship, where she studied the connections between art and spirituality. She currently serves as Coordinator for Women’s Ministry at Park Cities Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas.
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
