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Book Reviews on...

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown
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Augustine of Hippo

by Peter Brown

St Augustine’s Confessions is one of our most recommended books on Five Books. In this biography, one of the great historians of the 20th century, Peter Brown, looks at the life of the extraordinary man credited with creating the concept of ‘original sin.’

Recommendations from our site

“it’s very rare that you work in an academic field and there is a secondary work that is just indisputably superior to everything else. An agent once said to me that Brown’s book is known in her field as a “category killer”. No one else dared to write a biography of Augustine, really until the late 1990s. So, for 30 years—for basically a full generation—that was the work on Augustine.” Read more...

The Best Augustine Books

Catherine Conybeare, Classicist

“I would say that this is the outstanding biography of the 20th century…Augustine is the giant thinker and writer of the Latin Christian world. He was born in 354 to a simple humble background in a little town called Thagaste in North Africa. He was a man of bewildering literary intelligence and superb literary ability. In conventional caricature, he is feared as a figure of excessive authoritarianism, who held dark views of human nature, who invented the idea of original sin. But when you read his writing, he is a figure of infinite caution on many topics and has a much more subtle mind than people give him credit for. Both philosophically and as a reader of the Bible, he is a challenge to anyone alive now.” Read more...

The best books on Religious and Social History in the Ancient World

Robin Lane Fox, Classicist

“Brown relates a life story that lets us understand Augustine, sympathise with him and even to like and to respect him. That’s great writing.” Read more...

The best books on Sin

Paula Fredriksen, Theologians & Historians of Religion

Other books by Peter Brown

The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity by Peter Brown

The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity
by Peter Brown

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter Brown

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
by Peter Brown

The Cult of the Saints Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity by Peter Brown

The Cult of the Saints Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity
by Peter Brown

The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown

The World of Late Antiquity
by Peter Brown

Our most recommended books

  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

    War and Peace
    by Leo Tolstoy

  • On Liberty
    by John Stuart Mill

  • Middlemarch
    by George Eliot

  • Nineteen Eighty-Four
    by George Orwell

  • The Odyssey
    by Homer and translated by Emily Wilson

  • The Confessions
    by Augustine (translated by Maria Boulding)

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