Reading Eusebius in Modernity and Postmodernity: The Ecclesiastical History in Modern Scholarship

Our treatment of Eusebius’s reception in the modern period will inevitably be selective, not least because of the diversification of approaches to his work and to early Christian literature generally, as the traditional understanding of what counts as “patristic” literature, who studies it, and for what reasons have all changed dramatically over the last half century.¹ “Modern” will mean the period after the rise of history as a scholarly discipline and the adoption of “scientific” criteria for the writing of history in the seminars of nineteenth-century German universities. At that time the various themes and trends in historical study that