P.'s volume is the latest contribution to a new generation of scholarship on St Augustine of Hippo's first four writings as a Christian believer, writings that, because of their setting at a villa north of Milan, are commonly known as the Cassiciacum dialogues. Whereas most twentieth-century Augustinian studies more or less strip-mined these early works for evidence of Augustine's alleged neo-Platonic beliefs at the time of his conversion to Christianity, P. and others have shown greater respect for the delicate ecology, so to speak, of Augustine's compositional art, attending to his dexterous use of the dialogue genre, his pedagogical intent and his often subtle engagement of the great authors of classical antiquity.

P.'s specific contribution to the conversation on Cassiciacum is his thesis that Augustine's engagement of pagan literature is best described as a process of ‘recuperation’, in which classical texts are studied carefully by the Christian believer and then put to good use, despite their often questionable content. Lifting his terminology from the dialogues themselves, P. identifies three prongs to Augustine's method of recuperation: recensere or ‘reviewing’ the text with an eye to those passages that might reasonably be applied to the philosophical debates at Cassiciacum or even to Christian truths (p. 17); tractare or ‘pondering’ the value of those passages (pp. 23–4); and congruere or ‘applying’ or ‘fitting’ the passages to other matters outside the original narrative, such as Ciceronian scepticism or Christian doctrine (p. 25). With respect to the auctores of these texts, Virgil occupies a privileged position at Cassiciacum, followed by Terence. Indeed, in P.'s view, the main object of Augustine's teaching at Cassiciacum is to school his pupils in the Christian transformation of Virgil.

P. contends that recuperation is far from being a rhetorical ornament, a mere apologetical tactic, or a historical necessity (given that at the time, all education meant pagan education). Rather, it is an important component in Augustine's greater task of relating the text to one's life, even one's life as a Christian, and to creating a specific Christian reading culture. Recuperation is also an essential first step in Augustine's goal of creating what P. calls a ‘powerful reader, entrusted with a meaning-making ability owed only to his or her wit and training’ (p. 32).

P.'s thesis has several notable strengths. First, it explains Augustine's often puzzling use of his classical sources (which can at times seem inconsistent or downright schizophrenic) as part of a broader, coherent pedagogical project. Second, it includes an able elucidation of how Augustine sees poetry and poetics as potential handmaids of philosophy rather than mortal enemies of each other. Third, it highlights the surprising sophistication and quality of the Cassiciacum dialogues, which can be easily (but wrongly) dismissed as a primitive beginning to Augustine's tenure as a master theologian from which he later distanced himself. Fourth, it demonstrates both the continuity and the development of Augustine's thought from Cassiciacum to his more seminal works such as the Confessions and On Christian Doctrine, both of which, P. argues, presuppose the recuperative method outlined at Cassiciacum even as they break new ground in sublimating recuperation into a grander and more reader-driven hermeneutics of charity. Although P. devotes the bulk of his energy to detailed exegeses of each of the Cassiciacum dialogues (the Contra Academicos, De beata vita, De ordine and Soliloquia), his ancillary treatments of the Confessions and On Christian Doctrine are equally insightful.

Not all of the volume is above criticism. P. is sometimes given to overstatement, as when he nonchalantly declares that ‘Augustine and his cohort were on a hiatus specifically to study Virgil’ (p. 25), even though this is nowhere stated explicitly in the dialogues and is potentially reductionist. Similarly, P. sometimes lays an unnecessary stress on some of his distinctions, for example, the distinction between poetry – as the versifying that one does – and poetics – as the liberal discipline that one studies. Either way, Augustine's key insight seems to be that both the composition of verses and the study of poetry can be a problem as well as an essential part of the solution. Philologists will also dispute some of P.'s translations that have been strained to fit his novel reading of the texts.

Moreover, the volume misrepresents some of Augustine's theology. P. argues that Augustine views language as ‘bipolar’ because it reflects both truth and falsity in a way that is analogous to the ‘bipolarity’ of the God-man Jesus Christ (p. 142), and that it is this bipolarity that enables it to be recuperated or salvaged for Christian use. Such a claim, ironically, is itself in need of significant recuperation, not only because the hypostatic union is not analogous to P.'s depiction of language's union of truth and falsity, but because that depiction itself is debatable. (Soliloquies 2.10.18 does include a discussion of what is bifrons or two-faced, but it concerns things like actors and pictures, not words or language.) Nor is it likely that Augustine thought that God the Father ‘recuperates’ His Son in the way that His Son recuperates fallen humanity (p. 133). P. further asserts that for Augustine, the Sacred Scriptures are ‘wounded’, but his conclusion is based in part on an odd reading of On Christian Doctrine 1.14.13 (pp. 165–6), which does not discuss the Scriptures at all but Christ as both the Physician and the Medicine for the wounds caused by sin. If anything, the Scriptures in this metaphor would be the different-shaped bandages that the Physician applies to our various wounds, not the wounds themselves.

None the less, P.'s overall thesis remains compelling even when some of his particular arguments are not; indeed, I found even the areas where I disagreed with him instructive and helpful in so far as they drew my attention to passages or themes to which I had given too little attention. P. has written a monograph worthy of serious attention; I look forward to his forthcoming work on Virgil and the Confessions.