This major study of Augustine's biographer seeks a new reassessment of the relationship between the Vita and Augustine's published corpus. Hermanowicz challenges the widely held assumption, fostered by Possidius, of a united African episcopate proceeding in harmony with Augustine's teaching and under his influence. By acknowledging that such a picture is a later construction fostered by Possidius, she claims, positively, that she can expose a more historically accurate account of the African episcopate in which a collection of independently minded individuals sought to achieve a common orthodoxy by behaving like secular magistrates called upon to make legal judgements. Heresy, in such a perspective, was not simply the product of bad theological arguments but an error to be ruled illegal on grounds of previous decisions made in similar cases and applied by the use of appropriate forensic arguments. The Vita concluded with an Indiculum of Augustine's works, even though most of the extant manuscripts contain either the one or the other. But originally Possidius had written in the literary tradition according to which literary collections were prefaced by the author's biography. Possidius' Indiculum was not that of Augustine: he grouped Augustine's works together according to subject and not chronologically. Such a grouping is indicative of Possidius' intention to present Augustine's works as a once for all definitive and unalterable statement of his theology without any self questioning or development, to be used in evidence in legal cases. Significantly he will claim that Augustine's Retractiones were composed near to his death and not eighteen years previously so that his subject emerges as reaching decisive conclusions, and not as a continuously self-reflective thinker. Augustine's works become, therefore, legal documents, to be used together with Scripture and acts of councils by African bishops before civil magistrates to determine who are in heresy and therefore to whom church property should be assigned or re-assigned. Thus Hermanowicz is led to a careful examination of Augustine's Vita against his Confessions, in which she establishes that Possidius is adjusting the events recorded in order to present his life as it should be rather than what it was. Thus Augustine and his works find due place in the life of a fifth-century bishop administering an alternative system of justice, or addressing Roman courts armed with the legal sources into which selections of his works were now to be grouped. In the account of his conversion no mention is made of Augustine the Manichee (which would enable the Pelagians to make that continuing charge against him stick in court), let alone his reading of Cicero's Hortensius, of Aratus and the astronomers, of Neoplatonism, etc. Ambrose and his allegorical exegesis are given sole credit as what only the power of a bishop's words can conclusively and decisively effect (pp. 26–7). Thus the introduction of Augustine's failure with the agens in rebus to adopt an ascetic life was because he was then a layman, in contrast with Augustine who as bishop convinces Firmus in his monastery to abandon his Manichean heresy (pp. 29–30). In thus incorporating Augustine's writings as part of previous legal documentation he was in reality opposing Augustine's view that only Scripture was inerrant, and that councils could err. Such a view would undermine the growing view of Possidius and his episcopal colleagues of Scripture as compromising but one part of a jurisdictional framework in which final past decisions on heresy produced new decisions in accordance with legal argument (pp. 225–6). This book is of great significance for Augustinian studies and the mould in which Augustine's works were recast from the fifth century onwards.