Amazon.com: St Augustine: Books: Serge Lancel
Books: Revealing the remade Augustine
Augustine for the New Age - New York Times
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.09.06
From a review of O'Donnell's book by Brent Shaw:
The subtitle of this new life of Augustine announces a biography. It is both that and rather more. Before O'Donnell's Augustine, there were two big standard works on Augustine's life. Peter Brown's now-classic Augustine of Hippo first appeared in the 1960's. It was a spectacular and pathbreaking work of genius written by a young man who was then only in his early thirties. Not without good reason does O'Donnell himself laud Brown as "Augustine's best biographer" (p. 73). Brown's Augustine appeared again at the turn of the millennium, with reconsiderations [End Page 132] that looked back on the author's original work from the perspective of a half-century of changes in which Brown himself had a large part. Then Serge Lancel's Saint Augustin appeared just before the turn of the millennium, first in French and then, within three years, in an English translation—a biography whose extraordinary quality was assured by the author's incomparable command of the whole range of ancient North African history. Whereas Brown's work set Augustine's life in the context of the development of Late Antique culture and thought, Lancel offered a more strictly biographical perspective that placed the man more firmly than ever in his African homeland and culture.
O'Donnell's Augustine is not like either of these now-classic lives.
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