Editing Augustine's sermons is a considerable challenge. The shape of the collection is still set by the seventeenth-century edition of the Sermones ad populum by the Benedictines of Saint-Maur (reproduced in Migne's Patrologia latina). This consists of some 396 items, grouped by biblical lection, liturgical calendar and theme. Subsequent discoveries have added no fewer than 203 sermons which are believed to be genuine, each carefully inserted within the Maurist sequence by means of an alphabetical suffix, while others already in the corpus have been dismissed as inauthentic. Although most of the additional entries were printed in editions meeting modern scholarly standards, much of the original corpus has been neglected, not least because of the complexity and abundance of the manuscript tradition. The project to produce a new edition in the Corpus Christianorum series, beginning with Lambot's 1961 edition of the fifty homilies on the Old Testament, is now making good progress through the New Testament, with the initial parts of Matthew and Romans appearing in 2008. The present, substantial, volume completes the series on the Pauline and Catholic epistles with a critical edition of thirty-seven sermons.

The main stream of transmission for Augustine's popular sermons on the New Testament is the bipartite collection known as De verbis domini et apostoli, consisting of ninety-eight items (thirteen of which are now deemed to be inauthentic). More than half of the sermons in Boodts's edition occur in this collection. Her preface includes a lengthy essay on ‘The manuscript transmission of the De verbis apostoli collection up to the twelfth century’, in which Boodts applies evidence from her collations to build on the advances made by Verbraken and Partoens in understanding the relationships of the thirty-three principal manuscripts and the origins of this important collection. It appears that the De verbis domini collection predated De verbis apostoli: unlike the former, the latter does not present sermons in biblical sequence, and the two parts are separated by the pseudonymous Sermon 384, which does not properly fit with either. Even after their unification, the continuing independent transmission of the constituent parts (as well as some overlap with collections such as the Sessoriana or Campana) resulted in a variety of potential avenues of textual contamination.

This edition presents each sermon separately, with every item preceded by an introduction discussing scholarship regarding its date, context and transmission history. The bibliography is impressively up to date, and there is also a consideration of secondary sources such as Florus and Eugippius. No sermon is excluded from the sequence on the grounds of inauthenticity or incompleteness, although two are lacking a text: Sermon 164A was originally identified by Lambot as an extract from a sermon on Galatians, but the recent discovery in Erfurt of the full version has shown that it is better classed among the sermons on almsgiving, as Sermon 350F; similarly, the fragmentary Sermon 176A is now known to be part of Sermon 162C and so is no longer given independently. On the other hand, this volume is the first to present Sermon 166A as such: despite its longstanding incorporation into Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos as an exposition of Psalm xxv, it has been demonstrated by Clemens Weidmann to be a secondary addition, and his edition of the text is reproduced here as a homily on Ephesians iv.

The majority of the editions are the work of Boodts: apart from five sermons whose text she has already published elsewhere (Sermons 168, 170, 180, 182, 183), they appear here for the first time, and include revised texts of the sermons discovered since the Maurist collection. Partoens contributes editions of Sermons 163 and 176, while Sermon 169 is a collaborative endeavour by Boodts, Partoens and Torf: all three are reprints of recent journal articles. The introductions to these, as well as Weidmann's edition of Sermon 166A, are in English, as is the preface to the whole volume. The five items in this series for which the Mainz codex is the sole or principal witness (Sermons 159A, 159B, 160, 162C, 177) are provided by Dolbeau, with French introductions: each of these has been revised from his editio princeps with the adoption of new conjectures, making this volume the state of the art for the entire sequence.

What changes does this new critical edition propose to the text of the sermons? A collation of two of the shorter pieces suggests that alterations have been minimal. Just five of the 574 words of Sermon 172 differ from the Maurist edition, while Boodts's text of Sermon 166 departs from that of Lambot for only two of 691 words. Nevertheless, what we gain is a critical apparatus of the key manuscripts and editions, demonstrating the overall consistency of their transmission. This reports a variety of scribal errors (diagnostic of different strands of transmission) as well as interventions by editors old and new. The demonstration of the relationship of the editorial texts to the manuscript tradition, especially for those sermons preserved in numerous witnesses, places the critical text on a much firmer footing than has previously been the case for most of these items.

Overall, this volume is a major achievement. The preface demonstrates textual scholarship of the highest order and the individual editions are clearly and consistently presented. The introduction to each text offers a helpful summary of its history and transmission, while the indices of biblical quotations, sources, sermon collections and manuscripts span the entire range of sermons. Although the price is likely to restrict purchase of this volume to research libraries, many scholars will benefit from the acquisition of what will now be the first point of reference for these important documents of Augustine's theological and pastoral concerns. Given the age of the Maurist text which it replaces and the high quality of its production, this edition may be considered an investment to last not just for decades but centuries.