This book explores the earliest works of St. Augustine to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine, one who gives questioning, uncertainty, and human limitations their due role in his theology. These early works are considered performances, through which multiple questions can be raised and multiple options explored, both in words and through their dramatic framework. It is shown that the very idiosyncrasy of Augustine’s arguments and his manner of pursuing them are of immense significance, which suggests possibilities for interpretation of the more idiosyncratic riches in his later works. The book is divided into three parts. Part I analyzes Augustine’s use of the genre of philosophical dialogue, why he may have chosen the genre, and what he achieves with it. Part II discusses the roles played by Augustine’s mother. Part III focuses on the dialogue, the Soliloquia.

The heart of this book is a reading of the letters of Paulinus of Nola, aristocratic convert to Christianity of the late fourth‐century, and his correspondents, most notably St Augustine of Hippo. We begin with an analysis of letter writing in late antiquity; we investigate the letters as traces of fuller historical events, emphasize the importance of the letter carriers, and conclude that the letters have a sacramental function. The notion of spiritual community created and sustained by the letters is explored through discussions of Christian friendship, and of the patterns of imagistic thought which facilitate the spiritual interpretation of mundane events. Finally, we demonstrate how Paulinus’ notion of spiritual community leads to a novel conception of the self as truly relational. The impact of these letters, and of the epistolary mode, on the formation of Christian ways of life and thought is extraordinary.

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This chapter discusses Augustine's duty as a teacher, looking at the importance of disciplina, and of the need to communicate godlike wisdom to others. In the retirement of Cassiciacum, Augustine drew on resources nearer to hand: those of the Ciceronian–Platonic philosophical dialogue. In that most conventional and nostalgic of didactic genres (in the early part of Book 2 of De Ordine), he devised a ‘theology’ of disciplinarity which, by undercutting the Neoplatonic distinction between the divine and the corporeal, already casts doubt on the logic of his proposed Christianisation of the liberal disciplines. The chapter suggests that the abandonment of the ‘disciplinarum libri’ reflects Augustine's own recognition of the project's conceptual inadequacy.

This essay uses contemporary theories of masculinity to read Prudentius' narrative of the martyrdom of St. Laurence ( Peristephanon 2). We find that, far from being the site of a conventional glorification of martyrdom and Rome, this narrative contains many subversive elements which derive from the presentation of Laurence as ambiguously-gendered. The subversion is epitomized in the famous jest of Laurence as he lies roasting on the gridiron; but we see here how Prudentius' poem, and other lesser accounts of the same martyrdom, place this jest in a wider context of shifting masculinities, social critique, and antihegemonic hilarity.