Writing

"Sitting at the table, looking over the sea into the ever-changing sky, thinking and typing word by word into her laptop was gaining normality and using the time that was given to her. Her smile, kiss, and invitation to sit next to her made me write these lines and explore a territory I had hardly thought of before. She insisted that life is limbo and that no one should miss the opportunity to explore this blink of an eye, in which life was given sense." — Early Christianity and the Challenge of Writing History, 3

Beginning

"while at first I was unsure, it seems to me that the question of where to begin with history has a huge bearing on its outcome. If I cannot start writing history from anywhere other than now, here, from the very moment that I am typing these characters, words, sentences into my laptop, then is what I am writing and reading history, herstory, mystory, yourstory? As we know, ‘story’ is only the Early Modern Eng lish equivalent of what in the Medieval period was ‘historie’, ‘estorie’, ‘istorie’ or in French ‘histoire’. Its feminine gender both in French and in its older Latin form defies the contemporary male character of the English word and, more importantly, in French and in Latin the difference between modern ‘history’ and ‘story’ (or in German ‘Geschichte’ and ‘Geschichten’), between a fact-based and a fictional writing, is inexis tent. What I am going to suggest in what follows is a positive version of presentism, one that transcends the difference between history and story, between history and herstory, between history and mystory, between mystory and yourstory." — Writing the History of Early Christianity, 17