David Aers's latest offering is self-confessedly primarily a work of theology rather than of literary or intellectual history, and once the methodological implications of this have been taken on board, the book makes for, as we have come to expect of this author's scholarship, a stimulating read. Salvation and sin spans patristic thought and medieval scholastic and extra-mural theology as well as poetry. The main authors considered are Augustine of Hippo, William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine, William Langland and Julian of Norwich, and their different kinds of engagement – in terms both of content and method – with ideas of salvation and sin, redemption, conversion and agency are examined. Beginning with the Augustinian notion of ‘the privatising individualism of the Fall’ (p. 9), Aers traces certain themes and variations in medieval texts, belonging to genres as diverse as academic theology, vernacular dream-vision poetry and ‘mystical’ writing, exploring both the psychological and societal consequences of that first disobedience. Literary scholars in particular will be grateful for Aers's illuminating analysis and rehabilitation of the often neglected figure of ‘Semyuief’ in the C-text of Piers Plowman: ‘half-alive, half-dead, utterly dependent’ (p. 89); Semyuief is shown to be central to Langland's Christological theology. Of equal interest is Aers's analysis of the idiosyncrasies in Julian's vision of human agency in sin, and her ‘hollowing out of the language and theology of sin’ (p. 170), so that serious Christological difficulties arise. However, the ideal readership of this book, in terms of its method and emphases, would be, one feels, less literary or historical scholars than theologians with an interest in the working out of some of the fundamental concerns of Christian soteriology in a range of discursive modes beyond those pertaining to pure academic theology.