The women who made Augustine

David Lloyd Dusenbury recommends Kate Cooper’s new book Queens of a Fallen World:

Kate Cooper is beautifully attuned to the fact that it is not only the secrets of Augustine’s beginnings that are shared by a woman in his life, and by his God. (The bishop rhythmically addresses God in that way – ‘my God’, Deus meus.) We know something of the dramatic presences of several women in Augustine’s life – and their still more dramatic absences – because he tells us. Yet Cooper seems to be the first historian to have asked, in a sustained and systematic way, exactly what he tells us – and what, beyond that, we can infer or conjecture.

Source: Engelsberg Ideas