St Augustine famously saw in the creation week of Genesis 1 a framework by which world history could be organised and the progress of humanity’s salvation described. He developed the scheme over the rest of his life as he worked with various parts of Scripture. This lecture will highlight an example of some of the afterlife of Augustine’s approach in an obscure exegetical tradition of the early middle ages that read the eight parables Jesus tells in Matthew 13 as providing alternative descriptions for each of Augustine’s ‘ages’ (aetates) of human history. Developed through numerological connection with the Beatitudes and the Psalms, this tradition finds its fullest form in the monumental commentary on Matthew’s Gospel composed by the ninth-century monk and deacon Paschasius Radbertus (c.785-c.860): a work which Henri de Lubac judged to be ‘doubtless the masterpiece of Carolingian exegesis’, and an author who has been deemed ‘the greatest theologian of the Carolingian era’. Beyond shedding light on a forgotten part of the history of ‘Augustinian exegesis’, this lecture will make certain suggestions for how we think about what such early medieval exegetes understood themselves to be doing as they interacted with their authorities and commented on the Scriptures, in a creative (and not simply regurgitative) extension of tradition.