The subtitle of The Wandering Mind is 'What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction,' which is a tantalizing, if somewhat misleading, proposition. This is a charming and peculiar book. I can’t blame Kreiner for using 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..

The Wandering Mind is a lucid and vivid examination of how early Christian monks created habits of contemplation.

[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 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..

Meticulously detailed and surprisingly accessible, this lends new insight into one of the oldest human preoccupations. Readers will be enlightened..