Chapter 4 - Narrative and Space in Christian Chronography

Summary

If, from its beginnings, historical writing in the Graeco-Roman world was bound up with choices about which spaces to include, this was no less true of the Christian varieties of historiography that emerged in late antiquity.¹ Part of the challenge for Christian authors offering narratives of the intersections between the classical and the Christian pasts was deciding how to delineate the geographical spaces in which those histories took place. At the beginning of the fifth century, Paulus Orosius famously prefaced his Seven Books of Histories Against the Pagans with a description of the world based on Roman provinces – a choice that presented problems when he came to narrate the biblical past, at which point he was forced to offer various glosses to provide his readers with spatial orientation.²