Kate Cooper’s Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions came to my attention via 
an article on the shortlist for the 2023 Cundill History Prize. (BTW, that’s a good-looking group of books, if you’re a history nerd.) I teach Augustine’s Confessions every spring, but always find it a bit of hard going in a literature class, so anything that might help me out, I try to look at. (Last spring it was Natalie Carnes’s Motherhood: A Confession which is also fantastic.) Cooper’s central idea is simple: there are four women at the heart of Confessions, though only one of them is ever often discussed in detail, but to look at all four is to round out our understanding of Augustine’s Roman context, as well as to illuminate both the text and subtext of the work itself. His mother Monica is, of course, one of the four, but the other three are the Empress Justina, his mistress/concubine (here called “Una”) and the fiancee he ultimately jilts (here called “Tacita”).
Cooper doesn’t just follow each woman’s narrative in a large block, one at a time: she first explores each woman’s social and historical context, because each is very different: Justina is, obviously, an empress and a major political figure; Monica was the wife of an upper middle-class Roman citizen of North Africa; Una was very likely an enslaved woman, or maybe a free servant of Monica and Augustine’s household; and Tacita would have been the daughter of a wealthy upper-class family, whose wealth and connections would have enabled Augustine to enter the upper echelons of Roman society and perhaps even attain a senatorial career. With these contexts established, Cooper then traces each woman through the text, seeing what’s revealed by each. With Justina, it’s the political/religious conflicts with Augustine’s mentor, the bishop Ambrose in Milan, which Augustine himself skates over but which are critical to the historical moment. For Monica, it’s mostly illuminates in more detail how remarkable it is that Augustine centers her so prominently in his text.
Una and Tacita are the most interesting: Cooper is clearly immensely sympathetic to Una’s lousy position in Roman society. If, as is most likely, she was enslaved, Una had little personal or sexual agency, and her place as Augustine’s concubine/mistress and mother of his son was likely the most safe, stable situation she had. While the mentions of her in the text are brief, Augustine was clearly deeply attached to her, both emotionally and physically, but Cooper explores how the loss would have been even more profound for Una, who disappears from the record and whose fate we can only wonder at. It was, very possibly, not wonderful. Tacita, while vastly more privileged, did not occupy an enviable situation either: she was ten years old when she was engaged to the thirty-ish Augustine, a betrothal that would last until she was marriageable at age twelve. My students are always horrified by this; it is indeed terrible, though Cooper unpacks the social structure at the time that made marrying off twelve year old aristocratic girls acceptable. What Cooper does most capably with these two women, though, is bring into relation two strands of Confessions that are often treated separately: Augustine’s struggles with his lust and his ambition. Through Una and Tacita, Cooper makes a convincing case that the great saint’s lust and ambition were, in fact, inextricably entangled: he desired a sexual partner, but also a brilliant career, and it is only by forsaking both (and thus perhaps irrevocably damaging the lives of two women) that he became the religious and historical figure we know him as today.
While Cooper is an academic, she clearly wrote this book for a mass audience: it’s written in a highly accessible style with a deft incorporation of historical sources that never takes a reader out of her central narrative. Given that the Cundill Prize is partly about historical works that combine originality, literary excellence, and also broad appeal, i.e. that a bright non-specialist could pick them up and get through them, I can see how Cooper wound up a finalist for the award.
The major critiques I’ve seen of the book involve the amount of what one reviewer called “scholarly best-guessing” that Cooper does about Tacita and Una in particular; another reviewer complained that Cooper didn’t, say, look at Augustine’s sister or nieces (but, to be fair, Augustine never mentions these women at all in Confessions, nor does he really mention his older brother–as autobiographies go, it is highly selective). But Cooper does offer new shading and dimension to a well-known text, and it’s hard to ask for much more.
Also, let us acknowledge one indisputable truth: that title kicks ass.