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BROWN, P., The Ransom of the Soul. Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) / London, 2018. 1st paperback ed. XIX,262p. Paperback. ‘This book is about Christian attitudes toward the religious use of wealth within the context of interaction between the living and the dead between the time of Tertullian (ca. 160-240) and Julian of Toledo (late seventh century). The result is a stimulating, evocative, though sometimes impressionistic, study of the ways that late antique and early medieval Christians deployed their wealth through charitable giving for the benefit of their own souls and the souls of their loved ones, living and deceased. The book’s five chapters and long epilogue proceed chronologically, but all fall neatly into two parts. The first half of the book is a Mediterranean enterprise. (…) The second half of the book plants itself firmly in early medieval Gaul, where with and sixth-century authors provide the clearest guide to the reception of Augustine’s ideas about the human should and the use of world wealth. (…) Over time, Augustine’s ideas about the importance of Christian charity to the poor “hardened … into a full-blown ideology of church property” (130). Yet, despite all (…) changes, Brown sees a thread of continuity: “in sixth-century Gaul, gifts for the soul continued to be seen to operate through the poor” (173). In a long epilogue, he argues that the association between Christian charity to the poor and the fate of the human soul only changed in the seventh century, when the followers to the Irish monk columbines attracted wealth in exchange for prayers in a new equation of medieval piety from which the poor were conspicuously absent. Like so many of Brown’s books, Ransom of the Soul ranges widely across time and comfortably across diverse genres of evidence, from learned treatises too hastily scrawled graffiti. (…) One of the most striking features of this book (…) is the reminder that the mighty bishop of Hippo was not the unassailable authority that we often think he was. As Brown clearly shows, “Augustine’s extreme views were often treated with misgivings or quietly abandoned by a later generation of spiritual guides and preachers” (74).' (SCOTT G. BRUCE in Mediaevistik, 2015, pp.467-468). € 15.00 (New) ISBN: 9780674983977