A book chosen by The New Yorker magazine as one of the best books of the year, and a candidate for the 2026 Condell Prize for History
An extraordinary revisionist historical work focusing on Africa in the life of one of our greatest philosophers: “Excellent, short, and very easy to read… traces a more realistic story of a life he lived almost entirely in a small area of what is now eastern Algeria, where Augustine's local origins and experience profoundly shaped his life and thought.The author argues that his contributions to the fields of philosophy, biography, and Christian theology suggest that an essential part of the culture that Europe claims originates in Africa.
Augustine of Hippo (354-430), also known as St. Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including his autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, have contributed to shaping the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy.But over many centuries, Augustine's upbringing in North Africa and his barbarian heritage were ignored. Here, Catherine Conypierre, the world-renowned scholar of Augustine's affairs, brings the “African” dimension back to Augustine's story.As you can tell, his groundbreaking books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he returned wandering during a difficult time when the Western Roman Empire was collapsing. Using surviving letters and other fragments of evidence, Conypierre retraces Augustine's journeys, revealing how his groundbreaking work emerged from the perspective of exile in an African context.
