This new addition to the Cambridge Companion series is the first to deal with a single work by Augustine; the two existing Cambridge Companion(s) to Augustine (ed. E. Stump and N. Kretzmann [2001]; ed. D.V. Meconi and E. Stump [2014]) take on the entirety of his thought. One wonders whether this is the inauguration of a wider pattern: are we on the road towards a Cambridge Companion to Augustine's ‘Quaestiones in Heptateuchum’? Vast amounts of the saint's writing remain sidelined from course syllabi, despite the fact that there has been perhaps no better time than the present to be an Augustine specialist. Researchers can move from the Augustin Handbuch to Augustine through the Ages, consult articles in the magisterial Augustinus Lexikon and perform word-searches in the Corpus Augustinianum Gissense 3 database. Scholars such as A. Visser and K. Ettenhuber have reminded us that tools like these are nothing new; a reader such as John Donne could profit from Renaissance indexes in mining the vast, five-million-word corpus. Still, we are entering something of a new age in specialist research. The new frontier, it now seems, is the production of commentaries. P. White's new commentary on Confessions 5–9 and G. Clark's in progress on City of God 1–5 will communicate Augustine's appeal to a Classics audience, and both will be immensely useful to students. These go in tandem with current trends on the European continent: there is the ever-expanding French series Bibliothèque Augustinienne, as well as the German Augustinus: Opera–Werke and Italian Opere di Sant'Agostino. Meanwhile, the Zentrum für Augustinus-Forschung in Würzburg, Germany, is beginning an ‘Epistulae-Projekt’, an enterprise that could benefit research in many disciplines.

This all raises an important question: for whom, primarily, is the Cambridge Companion to Augustine's ‘Confessions’ written? A likely answer seems to be: not specialists, but ‘students’ in a broad sense – that is, anyone who has a zeal to learn more about the Confessions. Such students might include undergraduates as well as the lecturers who teach them, especially those who do not yet know much about Augustine. To this audience, the volume delivers on its genial and open-handed promise to be an ‘authoritative guide’ (p. i) and, quite simply, a Companion.

Really, as a series of essays by scholars, it is an introduction to a group of companions; and the perceptive reader may, in perusing the pages of this book, feel that rather than listening to a lecture, they are among a band of pilgrims or in a hill-walking group. What kind of group is this? It is a vastly learned group, with some of the leading specialists in the field, but also a fussy and spirited bunch with strong opinions. They may contradict each other: on p. 119 n. 32, V. Henning Drecoll challenges S. Byers’s account of the development of Augustine's grace doctrine. They may talk past each other: A. Kotzé in the chapter ‘Structure and Genre of the Confessions’ says that ‘it is not always clear what [scholars] mean when they call the Confessions a protreptic’ (p. 43), while a few pages later J.D. BeDuhn starts a sentence, ‘As a protreptic, the Confessions …’ (p. 48). Such juxtapositions, while potentially distressing to a neophyte, are to be expected in an edited volume, in which the authors appear to have submitted their own work separately or at least not to have altered it in response to the chapters of others. In the case of a guide to the Confessions, this is not a bad start: it punctures expectations that there is one ideal reader, one interpretation, one approach to the book, and liberates students towards finding their own way. Several contributors to this volume cite the powerful comments of Augustine himself in Retractations: that the Confessions ‘stir up the human intellect and affection for God’ (in eum [=Deum] excitant humanum intellectum et affectum) and ‘have been, and are, a source of great pleasure to many brothers’ (multis tamen fratribus eos multum placuisse et placere scio, 2.6). This volume, with its authors coming from multiple continents, testifies to the fact that the Confessions still mean a great deal to very many people today.

Students of any age opening a guide to the Confessions might ask: where is the chapter on sex? The stereotype of Confessions being the personal reflections of an author obsessed with lust and guilt persists, nourished by popular accounts such as Diarmaid MacCulloch's BBC Two series ‘Sex and the Church’. The answer to the question is: in multiple chapters in this volume, and in places one might not expect from the titles. P. Riley's chapter on the ‘Reception during the Enlightenment’ describes how Voltaire rather entertainingly but mendaciously speaks of Augustine ‘sleeping with his concubine in a bed of ivory and silver, with his wife sleeping with her lover in another room’ (p. 308). Riley stresses the charm of such descriptions, but also connects them to Voltaire's disdain for Jansenists and Jesuits, for whom Augustine was a crucial figure (cf. p. 314). A bold and useful essay on the topic of sex is also J. van Oort's ‘Sin and Concupiscence’. Van Oort argues that some of Augustine's statements in Confessions about his early romantic experiences ‘may best be read as indications of homoerotic relationships’ (p. 96). He also points out how this fact has been obscured in modern scholarship; H. Chadwick in his translation for the Oxford World Classics series, for example, renders concupiscere in Confessions 3.5 as ‘lusts after a girl’: ‘after a girl’, van Oort asserts correctly, ‘is simply made up’ (p. 96 n. 6). The volume, in general, encourages readers to take a broader view in exploring a given topic and to look for theological and philosophical resonances in Augustine's personal narrative. Multiple essays stress how, for Augustine, sexual desire and its power in the body is in fact part of a bigger picture of the human person: V. Henning Drecoll's chapter on ‘Grace’ is highly relevant as well as A.-I. Bouton-Touboulic's ‘Happiness and Friendship’. Instructors choosing which essays to assign to students on a certain theme might supplement the Cambridge Companion essays with the further readings cited at the end of each chapter or choose their own. In the case of sexual lust, a greater explanation of the Roman social and legal background could be useful, provided by an article such as K. Power's ‘Sed unam tamen: Augustine and his Concubine’, AugStud 23 (1992), 49–76; one could also assign primary source material from Augustine's own works.

Like C. Conybeare's Routledge Guidebook to Augustine's Confessions (2015), this Cambridge Companion contains a final section on the legacy of Augustine's work. The Cambridge Companion is more comprehensive on this front, however, with its Part 3: ‘Reception and Reading Strategies’ spanning some 90 pages, in comparison with Conybeare's 16-page ‘Afterword’. In the Cambridge Companion E. Leland Saak's contribution ‘Reception in the Middle Ages’ provides a useful corrective to the notion that the Confessions has always played so outsized a role among readers as it does today. ‘It was precisely the ‘boring’ portion of Augustine's life’ – that is, after the Confessions narrative ends, and Augustine becomes a bishop, Saak tells us – ‘that was the most interesting for medieval authors’ (p. 267). At the same time Saak stresses that a comprehensive medieval reception history of Confessions ‘remains to be written’; the marginalia, he says, ‘are still unstudied’ (p. 274). Essays from Part 3 might be paired especially with the opening Part 1 of the volume (‘Circumstances of Composition’), for example G. Partoens’s ‘Manuscript Transmission, Critical Editions, and English Translations’ with C. Hammond's ‘Title, Time, and Circumstances of Composition: The Genesis of the Confessions’.

Not everything is perfectly satisfactory: the volume is unfortunately marred by a number of typing errors, particularly in the first 100 pages or so (e.g. ‘affect’ for ‘affectu’, p. 16; ‘Retractions’ for ‘Retractations’, p. 38; ‘confidant’ for ‘confident’, p. 54), and has a non-uniform way of providing Latin citations. The latter I sometimes found particularly puzzling; thus on p. 13 quomodo scribendo profecerim is rendered as ‘how my writing has progressed’, which is perhaps acceptable as a paraphrase, but potentially misleading for readers who do not know Latin. On the same page, I am not sure that opuscula needs to be translated as ‘modest output’ (my emphasis; cf. the remarks of V.H. Drecoll, ‘Kommentar zu Augustin, Epistula 184A’, REAug 62 [2016], 70). In several places elements of the Latin seem to have been left out, at least if one is following the English translation given by the author (e.g. [laqueum] meum quo captus eram …, p. 53), or singulars in the Latin are translated as plurals in English, or vice versa (e.g. ‘sinners’ [peccatoris], ‘this’ [… haec], pp. 20–1).

Part 2, ‘Main Themes and Topics’, comprises the bulk of the volume. It is not possible to review all of the many contributions here. As a whole, the essays are particularly strong in investigating what Augustine means by ‘God’; in this vein, the essays by P. van Geest (‘God’) and P. Cary (‘Soul, Self, and Interiority’) are exemplary for exploring not just the philosophical background, but also Augustine's use of language (cf. van Geest, p. 135). L. Karfíková's chapter ‘Memory, Eternity, and Time’ makes the compelling claim that Confessions ‘captures a new kind of personal identity created by narration that relies extensively on memory’ (p. 175). This, along with A. Kotzé's comments on the relation of Conf. 1–9 to Conf. 10–13 in Part 1 of the volume (pp. 34–8), is useful for exploring the vexed issues of genre and autobiography. All in all, the contributors are conservative in the sense that they regularly cite some of the giants of twentieth-century Augustinian studies (J.J. O'Donnell, P. Courcelle, F. van Fleteren), scholarship in multiple languages and specialist resources such as the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. At the same time, it is hard not to come away from Part 2 without thinking there is a loss of focus, or sense of fragmentation, in the field at present. This is not necessarily a negative situation, but it does raise questions about the ability of scholars to track ‘progress’ or to persuade research funding bodies of the ‘innovativeness’ of a new project.

In any event, for the time being, this is an excellent and affordable companion volume to a reading or re-reading of the Confessions. Toom's moving personal comments in his introduction, on how the book has helped his own students reflect on what he calls ‘the meaning of life’ (p. 3), will probably resonate with many teachers.