This excellent case study investigates how confessional divisions conditioned the development of textual scholarship, interacted with editorial strategies in the second half of the sixteenth century, governed reading practices and determined the uptake of texts beyond the narrow confines of theological debate. Visser begins by investigating the three Opera omnia produced in the sixteenth century by the publisher Amerbach in 1505, by Erasmus in 1528–9, and by scholars from the University of Leuven in 1576–7. This reveals the increasingly cautious treatment of dubia and spuria, Erasmus' misgivings about aspects of the Augustinian corpus, and the surprising survival of much of his textual apparatus in the post-Tridentine Leuven edition which had to obey the anti-Erasmian strictures of the Roman Index of 1559. In his second section Visser examines the reading aids included in the various editions, paying special attention to the indices, and then looks in detail at Augustine's presence both in patristic anthologies and epitomes of his works, which occasioned the survival of parts of the corpus that humanist versions had described as pseudepigraphical. The next section deals with ownership and evidence of uptake. The author admits that ‘early modern readers used a diversity of texts in an almost endless variety of styles’, but is able through his analysis of the variables of reading (whether discontinuous or comprehensive, intensive, cursory, or undertaken for purposes of meditation, collective or individual) to show various degrees of philological and historical sophistication, even among theologians. A final chapter discusses the impact of Augustine beyond the printed text, mainly through the medium of sermons and vernacular pamphlets. This leads Visser to reaffirm the well-known point that all reading is a form of biased appropriation, and to show that Renaissance Augustinianism is not just Protestant anti-Pelagianism but can also take the form of support for ecclesiastical authority (witness Augustine's famous remark ‘ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae Ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas’). Visser sides with the modern scholars who have seen the rise of confessions not as a curb on textual humanism, but as a spur to better scholarship, philology and historical contextualisation, and argues also that in their practice of reading, humanists did not abandon the selective processes associated with their predecessors. There are aspects of this study which could usefully be developed or modified, concerning the Vatican presses (on which Rietbergen's article, not cited here, is indispensable), the issue of the ‘consensus patrum’ (which was flagged at the Council of Trent, but has not yet been settled by the Catholic Church), and the immense field of Augustine editions in the sixteenth century, which could benefit organisation by a taxomony similar to the one Visser produces for reading. But as it stands, Visser's monograph is a model both of how to deal imaginatively with a very broad subject in the light of the best modern scholarship, and of how to generate novel and convincing arguments which will guide further research in the field.