This rich and rewarding book explores the reading practices of the English preacher and poet John Donne, focusing in particular upon his engagement with the works of Augustine of Hippo. It is a valuable contribution to the history of reading, a rapidly growing area in early modern studies, since it connects the study of material reading practices to Donne's spiritual interpretation and literary production. Indeed, as Ettenhuber suggests, Donne's use of Augustine offers new perspectives to this field of study, as it exemplifies the implications of reading religious texts as ‘an intellectual method, spiritual discipline, or even a form of philosophy’ (p. 20). The book is organised into two parts. The first two chapters provide a solid survey of Donne's reading of Augustine, illuminating his views on reading and citing, the available textual sources and reference tools, as well as his actual methods and practices. Ettenhuber has examined more than a thousand references by Donne to fifty-four Augustinian and seven Pseudo-Augustinian works. Donne also had strong views about proper forms of reading and citing, frequently criticising as he did readers who presented ‘others wits fruits’ as their own, and comparing it, in Satire 2, to human ‘excrement’ produced by ill-digested food (p. 47). And yet, as Ettenhuber subsequently demonstrates, Donne himself found his references not only through direct, attentive reading of the original sources, but also by means of a variety of intertexts and reference tools, such as medieval and early modern anthologies, indexes and commonplace books. Thus, while the range of Donne's patristic knowledge was extensive, the number of Augustinian texts that he knew thoroughly was probably confined to seven or eight. It shows, as Ettenhuber rightly concludes, how the creative use of textual sources by learned readers in Renaissance Europe complicates traditional categories for interpreting citations such as ‘fidelity’ and ‘display’ (p. 104). In the second part of the book Ettenhuber investigates in five densely argued case studies Donne's recourse to Augustinian principles of interpretation. She highlights in particular the ethical dimension of Donne's Augustinian reading. Thus Donne's Essayes in divinity, for example, are studied as a project of ‘interpretive self-realization’ drawing on Augustine's ideas on humility as a hermeneutic condition (especially Confessions 7.9, 11.3.5 and 11.12.14). Other chapters are devoted to Augustinian modes of thinking in Biathanatos, his treatise on suicide, and his Lincoln's Inn sermons, dealing in particular with the ethical category of charity. Ettenhuber emphasises throughout that Donne's readings of Augustine are more than merely textual references to patristic authority; Donne reads Augustine to search for ‘global principles and interpretive fundamentals’ (p. 230). This stimulating study clearly shows the promising potential of the history of reading to shed new light on hermeneutic traditions in Renaissance literature.