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| Critics: |
An extraordinary work of revisionist history that centers Africa in the life of one of our greatest philosophers.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustine's North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the "African" back in Augustine's story. As she relates, his seminal books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he had returned as a wanderer during a perilous time when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling. Using extant letters and other shards of evidence, Conybeare retraces Augustine's travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exile's perspective within an African context. In its depiction of this Christian saint, Augustine the African upends conventional wisdom and traces core ideas of Christian thought to their origins on the African continent.
"[A]n essential reconsideration of a seminal figure in the Western canon." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"History buffs and Augustine scholars will be delighted by the level of detail here and impressed by Conybeare's own translations of the Latin sources, while casual readers may find themselves lost in the weeds. A scholarly biography that places Augustine's ambivalence toward Africa at the center of his and Christianity's story." —Kirkus Reviews
Catherine Conybeare, a renowned classicist, is the first woman to write a biography of Augustine since journalist Rebecca West nearly a century ago. Reinterpreting the writings of Augustine and his contemporaries has formed the heart of her scholarly work. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. She is Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College and lives in Pennsylvania.
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