Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions

by Kate Cooper

THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2023

The vibrant and surprising lives of the women in Augustine's Confessions

While many know of Saint Augustine and his Confessions, few are aware of how his life and thought were influenced by women.

Queens of a Fallen World tells a story of betrayal, love, and ambition in the ancient world as seen through a woman's eyes. Historian Kate Cooper introduces us to four women whose hopes and plans collided in Augustine's early adulthood: his mother, Monnica of Thagaste; his lover; his fiancée; and Justina, the troubled empress of ancient Rome. Drawing upon their depictions in the Confessions , Cooper skilfully reconstructs their lives against the backdrop of their fourth-century society. Though they came from different walks of life, each found her own way of prevailing in a world ruled by men.

A refreshingly complex and compelling portrait of Augustine, Queens of a Fallen World is the riveting story of four remarkable women who set him on course to change history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Religion, Ancient History, Christian, Womens

304 pages, Hardcover

Published April 18, 2023

About the author

I'm so happy to share my newest book QUEENS OF A FALLEN WORLD with you. This history tells the story of the last years of the Roman Empire through the eyes of four women who left their mark on the world thanks to what is possibly the greatest autobiography of Latin literature, the fourth-century Christian bishop Augustine of Hippo’s CONFESSIONS.

It's well known that Augustine had a close relationship with his mother Saint Monica, but the other women in Augustine’s life are equally fascinating. Piecing together their side of the story on the basis of fragmentary sources was a matter of detective work and a labour of love. A number of readers have said their story reads like a novel, but it it is all properly documented in the end notes!

I'm also the author of BAND OF ANGELS: THE FORGOTTEN WORLD OF EARLY CHRISTIAN WOMEN, which tells the larger story about how women shaped the world of early Christianity.

Thanks for visiting and for reading! And do please leave a review if you can spare a moment!

Reviews

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Attempts at retrieving female perspectives from historical periods where they are often silent in our available sources vary widely in their success. Sometimes a single female figure for whom we have at least some source material can be elevated by a modern writer to the point where the attempt to use them to make up for silence elsewhere borders on modern hagiography. We can see this in some of the sillier, mainly popular, accounts of, say, Hypatia of Alexandria which can veer off into fantasy. BUt better efforts take what little we do know about a woman in pre-modern history and what we can know about women like them and their society generally and then build a reasonable picture.

In this case Cooper has done the latter with great effectiveness. She has mined the work of Augustine, particularly his autobiographical Confessions, and paid careful and close attention to what he says about the women in his life: his mother, the woman he almost married, the woman he didn't marry and the Imperial mother who played a key role in the politics of his time. The fact that we don't even know the name of two of these women indicates how much sifting of the evidence Cooper has to do to build a picture of them. The other two - Augustine's mother Monnica and the empress Justina, mother of Valentinian II- we have reasonable information about. But Cooper uses what we can know about all four and women like them to bring to life their world; one in which even influential women are often silent and almost invisible in our sources.

By taking these four women as her points of focus, Cooper is able to explore the roles of women in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Childhood for girls was very different to their male siblings. Ditto education, status and expectations. Cooper examines marriage, childbirth, family politics and motherhood through the lens of her four subjects, using what Augustine says (and, often, doesn't day) and a range of other sources to build a picture of the world of Late Antiquity from the female perspective. The usurpers, civil wars, court politics and barbarian incursions that usually dominate historians of this period are found at the periphery of Cooper's examination. Dangers and threats of another kind plagued women in this period.

The result is a fascinating and different perspective and a fresh and useful contribution to our understanding of Late Antiquity.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

240811 Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions by Kate Cooper

https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Fallen-...



As the subtitle says, this is a book about the women in St. Augustine’s life. Since two of the for women discussed in this book are never named by Augustine and one of the two remaining women are never mentioned in the book, I had two thoughts: first, how much invention and mind-reading would the author indulge, and, second, how much of a feminist polemic would this be. The latter concern almost kept me from buying the book.
The good news is that Kate Cooper pulls off her assignment in a scholarly and interesting way. The historical part is well done. The scarcity of biographical information is rounded out by Cooper’s knowledge of Roman society. The theological/historical part is even-handed and avoids any tendency to make St. Augustine into a monster of the patriarchy.

The four women that Cooper discusses are Monnica – Augustine’s sainted mother; Tacita – the twelve year old heiress with the fat dowry that Augustine would have married as his ticket to Roman high society; Una – the concubine that Augustine was involved with for twelve years and with whom he had a son named Adeodatus; and Empress Justina, who is not mentioned in The Confessions, but who played a significant behind-the- scenes role.

Cooper provides a good deal of Roman cultural knowledge and history as a way of filling out the stories of these women. For example, she explains Roman inheritance rules and how those rules connected with the institutions of marriage and concubinage. The purpose of marriage in Roman society of the fourth century was to create an heir to property. Only the children of marriage could inherit. Concubinage was an accepted institution in the fourth century and carried no bit of shame or dishonor. It was a relationship of inequality between the man and the women, although it was not uncommon for a man to free a concubine slave in order to marry her.

In concubinage, the man had no duties to the concubine or the children of the relationship. The children of a concubinal relationship could never inherit. When the relationship was over, the woman would take the children with her.

This is why it was so remarkable that Adeodatus remained with Augustine after he ended the relationship with “Una” in order to enter the relationship with “Tacita.” Augustine loved Una. Except for the fact that he was ambitious, he could – he should have – remained dutiful to Una, something that he realized too late.

From the Confessions, one doesn’t get a sense that Augustine saw concubinage as morally problematic for the reasons we see it as morally problematic. I think we see it as morally problematic because it involves sex outside of marriage. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for Augustine, even when he was writing the Confessions as a Christian bishop. According to Cooper, Augustine’s moral problem with his concubinal relationship was that it actually was a marriage, but he didn’t recognize it as such until later. This says a lot about the moral change in Western society between Augustine’s age and ours.

Empress Justina isn’t mentioned in the Confession, but knowledge of her role behind the scenes is informative. Justina was the stepmother of Emperor Gratian, who was murdered in 383 AD, and the mother of Valentinian II, the minor was the sole sovereign of the Western Roman Empire. Gratian was murdered by a usurper named Maximus, who positioned himself to the north of Italy. Augustine’s mentor, St. Ambrose, acted as an intermediary between Justina and Maximus to stall Maximus’ invasion of Italy. Ambrose was successful – Maximus delayed long enough for Emperor Theodosius to intervene to end Maximus’ insurrection.

All of this plays out, unmentioned, in the background of the time that Augustine is in Milan studying under Ambrose. All the time of Augustine’s spiritual turmoil, his conversion after hearing “tolle lege,” and his baptism by Ambrose are foregrounded against a never-mentioned reality that an army was about to invade Milan. In fact, people were fleeing Milan and Italy, general. Augustine’s departure from Italy may have been motivated by the threat of the invasion, but this is never mentioned.

The woman most clearly described is Monnica. In Cooper’s telling, Augustine had a loving relationship with his mother, Monnica was a wise woman, and Augustine respected her intelligence. Monnica taught Augustine that social status was less important than personal merit. Monnica’s lessons were propagated into Western society.

Usually, Augustine is blamed for being addicted to lust, who transmitted a negative attitude about sex to the future. Cooper disagrees with this understanding. In her eyes, Augustine’s addiction was to greed and ambition, not lust. The following is such a revision of the traditional picture of Augustine, that it deserves quoting in full:

But reading the Confessions carefully, we encounter a different story. Augustine tells us that he and Alypius had debated whether marriage was a better way of life than asceticism, but he makes clear that he, Augustine, had won the debate. Largely by pointing to the example of his own harmonious home life with Una and their small son, Augustine had persuaded his friend that marriage had to be better than the single life. As he saw things in hindsight, the problem he had faced in the summer of 386 was not that sex and marriage were obstacles to communion with God. Rather, it was that his way of pursuing them had been immoral.

On this reading, the received view is not wrong that Augustine was recoiling from sin when he decided not to marry. But the sin that repulsed him was not lust; it was greed. What shook him, finally, was his willingness to betray the woman who ought to have been his wife—the mother of his child—for a lucrative arranged marriage. The root of his problem was not sexual desire. It was ambition.

Years later, after returning to Africa, Augustine would go on to become first a monk and then a Christian bishop, and his pastoral writings would repeatedly recognize a spiritual value in romantic partnerships outside wedlock. He would argue that a man who had lived with a concubine should not be allowed to marry, since in his day, second marriages were prohibited. Even if Roman law saw concubines as a having no legal standing, he argued, the church should see the union as spiritually equivalent to marriage. In other words, neither one of the pair should move on to marry someone else while the other was still living. This was and remained a minority view. Many Christians shared Monnica’s view that divorce was impossible, but this only applied to marriage, while others believed that under the right circumstances, Christians could divorce and remarry. With the exception of Augustine, no one seems to have believed that men should be forever faithful to a concubine whom they had specifically chosen not to marry.

If Bishop Augustine came to argue that a man who takes a concubine has a moral obligation to her, his contemporaries mostly saw a concubine as a person there to be exploited. Whether slave or free, she provided a service, and if she earned genuine affection from her partner, this spoke well of her but did not alter her position. By sleeping with her, the male partner acquired no long-term obligation toward her or her children, even if he was the biological father. Augustine would break with this tradition by arguing that in moral terms an established extramarital relationship carried the same responsibility as the legal bond of marriage.

We can see this in the famous scene in the garden at the climax of Book Eight of the Confessions, when Augustine decides to dedicate his life to God. This momentous scene has been persistently misunderstood. Certainly, he was guilty of a terrible sexual sin, but the sin was not sleeping with his concubine. It was casting her away.

Augustine’s story of his conversion begins with an admission that he had been a slave to lust and to worldly ambition. But now, God had freed him: “I will tell the story of how You, my help and my salvation, set me free from the chains of sexual desire, which held me so tightly, and from the slavery of my worldly ambition.”3 That Augustine addresses God by the term dominus—which means both “lord” and “master”—here is no accident; he wants to underline the helpless subjection he had labored under. “I was going about my usual activities,” he says, “with anxiety mounting ever higher, and every day I sighed for You.”4

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 195-196). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

This crystallizes something for me that I had long intuited. I’ve read The Confessions three or four times. I’ve never formed the picture that Augustine was a particularly “lustful” guy. His relationship with “Una” was one of faithfulness. He was obviously torn by putting her away. Admittedly, he said that he needed to have a woman in his life, but we do not hear about him visiting prostitutes, which were plentiful in the Roman Empire.

Based on what Augustine says, Cooper’s understanding is that Augustine came to understand himself as actually married to “Una.” This meant that marriage was not simply about inheritance. It involved a mutual willing of the “goods of marriage,” a term that the Church would use to describe the openness to children and the unity of life.

Augustine wrote on marriage in several books. He also wrote pastoral letters where he expressed these ideas. In a letter to a married woman named Ecdicia, he gave her counsel about her relationship with her husband. Augustine insisted that marriage was more than a contract, it was a spiritual fellowship. According to Cooper:

The letter to Ecdicia caught the eye of these later divines for it contained many distinctive ideas about the spiritual value of the marriage bond. It argued that marriage was not, as the Romans had always believed, simply a contract between families to organize the transmission of property. Instead, it was a spiritual fellowship that could be undertaken between individuals who had no intention of having children or even sleeping together, and it involved a vow before God that would last into eternity.

No one would have been more surprised than Ecdicia to learn that something good had come of her troubles. But in the eyes of the medieval church, her predicament was nothing less than providential; it was the grain of sand around which the pearl of the medieval Christian sacrament of marriage later grew.

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (p. 229). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

In a treatise, Augustine equated marriage with fidelity. According to Cooper:

In his treatise On the Good of Marriage, Augustine makes an unprecedented argument for an element of fair play between the sexes. The Confessions and On the Good of Marriage have traditionally been dated to the same period, the years directly after Augustine’s consecration as a bishop in 395, but in fact the date of both is uncertain. Yet the two texts need not have been written at the same time for us to see what they have in common. Both develop an impulse of self-criticism and offer an implicit critique of male privilege in relations with women.

Marriage is about trust, Augustine argues—the Latin term is fides, often translated as “faith” or “fidelity.” This means that each partner should be accountable to the other in the same way. A husband and wife enter the bond on the same terms: “They owe equal fidelity to each other.”18 So far, Augustine might not have ruffled too many Roman feathers—but only if he held back from spelling out in detail what his words actually meant.

But Augustine did not hold back: “Betrayal of this fidelity,” he says, “is called adultery, when through the prompting of one’s own lust, or through acceding to the lust of another, sexual intercourse takes place with another man or woman contrary to the marriage-pact.”19 With a stroke, he makes radical departure from the Roman understanding of marital fidelity, which deemed the relationship exclusive only for the wife.

By suggesting that for a man to sleep with a woman other than his wife constitutes adultery simply because he himself is married, even if she is single, Augustine steers definitively away from the Roman legal definition of adultery as a crime that turned exclusively on the violation of a married woman’s chastity. That definition was still in force at the time he was writing.

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 239-240). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

This is getting closer to the modern – Christian – understanding of marriage. It is hard for us to see how a Christian marriage could be otherwise, how it could be “Roman,” but that is an artifact of shapers of culture like Augustine.

This is a good work of intellectual history. It manages to demonstrate that the past is a different county and how we got from there to here. I do question one thing in this book. It seems that Cooper believes that Arianism was an invented issue:

Originally, the presbyter Arius taught that the Son of God was a human being born like any other creature, while his rival Athanasius, later bishop of Alexandria, taught that the Son of God was much more than a historical person: he was also the Word of God—the Logos—which had been spoken at the creation of the world. The creed proclaimed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 captured the idea by speaking of the Son of God as “eternally begotten of the Father.” After Nicaea there was no enduring “Arian” movement—Arius himself quickly modified his views to try to keep the peace. Still, the Nicene party discovered that constant accusations of heresy against their rivals was a powerful tool for populist crowd-building, and the fact that “Arianism” was an empty accusation made it particularly useful as a slur to aim at whomever the Nicene bishops disagreed with.2

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 137-138). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

First, I believe that the issue was whether the Son was created or eternal. Arianism agreed that the Son was divine, but also claimed that the Son was created by the Father, i.e., “there was a time when he was not.”

Second, there were emperors, churches, and entire Germanic tribes, such as the Ostrogoths, who were Arian. These groups persecuted Catholics, and vice versa, to be fair.

I am not sure what Cooper means here.

Nonetheless this is a short, accessible read that provides interesting background for one of the most interesting men in history.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I don't know much about this era, so I can't say how accurate her information is in this pop history. It is competently written, though repetitive in word use. She tries to help readers understand how complicated the era was and why they may not have seen anything wrong with how they treated women. The book could have been more succinct in places. The epilogue where she imagines an alternate timeline, while an interesting thought experiment, is irrelevant. She at least tells the reader the times she's vering into conjecture and puts her research and writing methodology up front. The book dragged at points, but was interesting. I now want to reread Augustine's body of work again. Her notes and further reading pages are well laid out. I'd have given it a slightly higher rating if she'd included a bibliography or works cited page as well. I couldn't tell when she was drawing on other sources beyond primary sources because there were only occasional end notes. No footnotes, and rarely an indication that she referenced any secondary scholarship beyond her own thoughts except for vague others think this sort of thing. I expected better from a History professor.

[Sarah Kimberley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. The more I read about women’s history, the more compelled I am to share these stories. Historian Kate Cooper reaches into the shadows of late antiquity and brings into vivid relief the lives of the women who shaped one of the most consequential thinkers in Western history: St Augustine. Women of a turbulent Roman Empire slipping its old skin, who brought presence to the social and cultural fabric of the fourth century. They were storytellers, mothers, lovers, daughters and empresses. Truly fascinating ✨

Cooper reorients our gaze, asking what the history of the late Roman world looks like when viewed through the lives of women long relegated to the margins of the record. I’ve felt so swept up into the drama of these intersecting, remarkable lives. The cost of ambition in an era of crumbling empires, such as that of Justina who was placed in sharp conflict with the age. The experiences of “silent” girls like Tacita, who being so young left no letters, no speeches nor record of her feelings. Yet her life was profoundly shaped by decisions made entirely without her voice. She was positioned to become the wife of Augustine the rising intellectual star, only to be quietly discarded when that path no longer suited him. Tacita’s story like so many, is one of interrupted possibility. You really begin to see how much of the ancient world was built on voices that were never allowed to speak ✨

The late Roman world isn’t so much this distant ruin, but it actually offers us a landscape haunted by old gods and lives lived in the in-between. At the heart of her narrative, Cooper uses Augustine’s own Confessions as her primary source while richly contextualising their worlds and place in the Empire. This is a compelling blend of early Christian history and women’s history 🏛️

[Maya Joelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this might be helpful for my thesis on Augustine; it was not. Cooper romanticizes and fictionalizes four women whom Augustine knew, going so far as to give them names and imagine their personal inner lives. She then shows how he mistreated them and ends by supposing what might have happened if he had married his first love or stayed with his mistress. This is Augustine fanfic more than actual historical research. I share her desire to have seen Augustine treat women differently in certain circumstances, but the fact remains that he did not, and writing emotional, sensationalized stories about that and marketing it as historical research is pretty silly and offputting to me.

To be clear, I did not read the book in full. Others have noted that while some of Cooper's historical notes are interesting (she believes the effect these women had on Augustine was integral to the theologian he became), she does not cite her sources very well. This made the actual history parts of the book useless for my research.

[Janta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narrative text was ~85% of the whole; remainder was bibliography, etc.

Interesting. I'll be honest: I lack the specialist background to really appreciate all the nuances and arguments in this book. Still, I think Cooper makes an interesting case regarding Augustine's feelings about women. I did think that at times Cooper was applying too modern a reading to Augustine's self-reported feelings and actions, but as I said, I lack sufficient scholarship here. It should also be noted that although the framework of the book is about the women in Augustine's life, he really does take center stage, since there's really so very little to go on WRT the women.

Overall, an interesting read for people interested in this sort of microhistory/specialist history focused on religion and women's history (at least sort of).

[Frejola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cooper provides a very engaging introduction / context into Augustine’s life and times. If I read novels for the prose and voice, I read History for stories and here we have a handful of great stories about Roman women.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up from the new books shelf at the library on a whim - the subject was one I know nothing about, and I'm really fascinated by what this generation of young women historians is uncovering in records we thought we knew about.

Cooper dissects what's known about Augustine, and his own words, to shed light on the women in his own life that shaped his opinions about marriage and relationships. Surprisingly, he had different views from the hard core church fathers like Ambrose and Jerome, although certainly not progressive by our standards.

I know nothing about the history of the Roman empire, but this book made as clear as possible a series of incidents that had bearing upon a turning point in Augustine's life. It may be overworking the evidence a little to really say the empress had much impact on him, but it is convincing to see Cooper tease out the fact that Augustine was not renouncing marriage when he suddenly left civic life and went to the church - he was renouncing greed and ambition. It was later church scholars who turned his complex and thoughtful Confessions into the anti-woman propaganda they wanted. The only weak link in this argument is the fact that after breaking his engagement to a well connected heiress, he did not return to the woman he had loved for over a decade.

This book was quite readable on a somewhat challenging subject.

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions by Kate Cooper is a brilliant and richly textured work that restores long-overdue visibility to the women who shaped one of history’s most influential thinkers. With elegance and scholarly precision, Cooper reclaims the lives of four remarkable women Monnica of Thagaste, Augustine’s unnamed lover, his fiancée, and the empress Justina revealing how their ambitions, sacrifices, and resilience profoundly influenced Augustine’s journey and legacy.

What makes this book so compelling is Cooper’s ability to combine rigorous historical research with vivid storytelling. Drawing skillfully from The Confessions and the social realities of the fourth century, she reconstructs these women’s inner worlds with sensitivity and nuance, never flattening them into mere footnotes of a great man’s life. Instead, they emerge as strategic thinkers, survivors, and agents of change navigating a deeply patriarchal society.

Cooper offers a refreshingly complex portrait of Augustine himself, showing how his ideas were forged not in isolation but through intense, often painful relationships with women of vastly different status and power. The result is a narrative filled with emotional depth, political tension, and intellectual insight.

Both accessible and profound, Queens of a Fallen World is an essential read for anyone interested in ancient history, early Christianity, or women’s voices long silenced by tradition. It is a powerful reminder that history is never shaped by one voice alone.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading a lot of mythological fiction lately -- it's definitely having a moment -- but it's been a while since I've revisited early Christianity. This was my area of focus in my undergrad work, and I have an abiding fondness for it. This book started promisingly -- it did, indeed, introduce the women in Augustine's life. Of course, the only source we have for much of this information is Augustine's works themselves, so there are a lot of assumptions about who those women were and what their relationships with Augustine were like. The narrative in this area is necessarily thin, since the entire knowledge base consists of only a few lines here and there. So, it feels like the text repeats itself a lot, and extends into general discussion of Augustine's theology, and Roman life and culture. All of that is interesting to me, but it wasn't really why I picked up this book. So, I'm left feeling a little dissatisfied, but I was happy to reunite myself with this subject matter.

[Beth Koop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cooper examines the world of Augustine through the lens of 4 women: Monica, his mother; Una, his concubine; Tacita, his betrothed; and Justina, empress and mother of Valentinian II. Despite the patriarchal and misogynistic age he lived in, Augustine played close attention to the women around him. Monica in particular played a large role in the development of his morals and ethics. Although Augustine appears to have a loving relationship with Una, he eventually abandons her to follow the accepted wisdom of marrying an heiress, but he backs out of his betrothal as well. Cooper speculates that this decision was not due to asceticism but to renunciation of greed. These experiences all lead Augustine to develop a Christian doctrine of marriage that has been handed down to today: that marriage entails a mutual bond of faithfulness; that both husband and wife are to be monogamous; and that children aren’t the only end of marriage.

[Sherrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite frankly, I think I ordered the wrong book from the library - and in some weird sense of honor, I sat down to read it regardless. Cooper's thesis here is that St. Augustine might have been a very different person without the influences of several important women in his life, so history nerds - especially those who are fascinated with the earliest years of the Christian faith - are going to absolutely love this. I was more interested in Cooper's detailed research into the sexual politics of the 4th century, specifically around love, marriage, and "your sidepiece" (aka your concubine). There's an very heartbreaking opera in here about the woman St. Augustine shacked up with for many years and had a child with, but the fates had a different path for him...

[Joey Gremillion]

I am embarrassed to say that I know very little about the Roman Empire except that it was a very brutal period, yet one that is culturally rich. This book gives a great insight into the life of women in the Roman empire, particularly the women in Saint Augustine's life (e.g. his mistress Una and his mother Saint Monnica). History contains the good, the bad and the ugly. Saint Augustine was a wonderful saint but there are things in his life that are not so great: he sired a child out of wedlock and left his mistress. But, history is history and must be told...AS IS... I am very impressed.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 A bit of an odd choice for me to read as if anything I am agnostic and definitely not a believer in organized religion, but I came across the book browsing at the library. And it was interesting since historically speaking Augustine’s thinking and philosophy had a great influence for a large period of our history. Of course, I was especially intrigued by the author’s purpose of illustrating the importance of a number of women in his life as revealed in his Confessions and once again illustrating how women’s history is so lost or hidden or dismissed.

[A Bookish Jungle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had its ups and downs but, overall, I liked it. I would have liked to hear more about the women directly (the first part of this book was the best because it focused so much on the women). The later chapters more overtly saw the women through the eyes of the men they came across. Of course, seeing the women through the eyes of men was inevitable and I knew that going in but that male-centered gaze was handled much better in the first part and, having read and appreciated that, I ended up being slightly let-down by how non-deftly the male gaze seemed to be handled in parts 2 and 3.

[Joelle Colville-Hanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at some women in Augustine’s life and times - his mother, his mistress and Empress Justine (none of whom were queens but okay..,)

This was a new look at Augustine and shows him with a more positive opinion of women and marriage than he usually gets credit for.

Also a less positive view of Ambrose who was more of a political player (and sometime asshole) than he is usually portrayed.

[Vontel]

I read parts of this book, since I do enjoy history & historical fiction, and thought I would enjoy it. I found it quite academic and dry, not quite what I was hoping to read at the time. I finally returned it to the library after renewing it at least once, hoping that I might find it more interesting to me at another time. I believe it's well written & referenced; however, I'm unlikely to return to try to read it again. Possibly the book is the end product from a PhD dissertation.

[Nicole Perkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was interesting discussion on Augustine’s mother Monnica, and Empress Justine. I appreciate that Cooper gave names to the two women most affected by Augustine’s actions, even if those were not their true names. She theorized that Augustine left them nameless in his Confessions out of respect; but I feel that too often women are left out of the narrative of their own lives, and I am glad Kate Cooper gave them identities.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was an interesting examination of the women who appear in Augustine's Confessions. The second half of the book followed Augustine and talked less about the roles of women in this time. I enjoyed the first half better, which examined each woman individually. I know there are not a ton of sources, so the author had to expand her scope some, but it wasn't as interesting to me.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up randomly on the new release schedule from the library and was drawn to the author’s characterizations and history. Even though it feels like there was not a lot to work with she managed to flesh out these women both close to and in the orbit of Augustine as well as of course elucidating his life as well.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another random pick from the new book shelves. Cooper weaves social history of women of the period into the threads of the women mentioned in Augustine's Confessions to try to fill out details and possible narratives in a way that worked well and made for an interesting, enjoyable, and surprisingly quick read.

[Sue Roselle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Historian extracts stories of four women from Augustine's Confessions. Somewhat difficult to follow other than his relationship with his mother. The final relationship was lengthy and with whom he had a son. Sadly, he does not even identify her by name. The end of their affair resulted in his belief that celibacy of the men of the church is preferred. Interesting, but slow difficult read.

[James Junke · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive work of scholarship and imagination. It profiles the four women who shaped his life: his mother, his only true love, a slave, his betrothed, the Emoress who reigned when he made his fateful decision to abandon it all for the life of a religious ascetic.

[Alexandria Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Technically, I only read the intro and the chapters on Monica and Augustine’s long time partner who had his son. But I’m giving myself credit for the whole book since those were the main people I was interested in

[John Lawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful history of bringing to life the voices and persons of the women of Augustine's life drawing mainly from the Confessions. Kate Cooper is a wonderful detective and explorer of an age when women were most often silent. I enjoyed and appreciated this book.

[Georgia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Contained a surprisingly small amount of information about both Augustine and the women in his life. It was also prone to supposition and conjecture, although this was at least clearly delineated from the facts. Strangely overly romantic about Augustine in the latter chapters.

[Courtney Riggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was enlightening learning about the broader context of the events going on in the time period which these people lived and how it influenced them. This has given me a fuller picture of Augustine and the state of Christianity that my history classes glossed over.

[Morgan]

I accessed a digital review copy of this book from the publisher.

[Fern · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as much about the women as I would’ve liked. Granted historically little info has come down through the years but then the title is misleading in suggesting the focus is all on the women.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes an academic valiantly writes for a general audience. So many interesting things to say, and some of them came together brilliantly in the final chapter.