Markus Vinzent is going to present a working paper on 'How to write History. From Reception to Retrospection'

Life must be understood backwards, but … it must be lived forwards’ (S. Kierkegaard); and so it is with writing history. It is done in retrospection, recollection and reflexion, by looking backwards; and it is written anachronologically, although the outcomes are chronological narrations. Having jumped into the past to reflect upon it, historians skip the time gap, and start walking alongside our protagonists. It is a strange phenomenon, an enigma, that our brain recognition always works backwards and in this sense seems to be conservative; while language with its in-built grammar always moves forwards, hence seems to be progressive and work creatively. Even when people ‘are forward-looking’, when they base their actions on a ‘cognitive map’ that is linked to future outcomes, in contrast to people who are consciously ‘backward-looking’ and ‘experience based’; even those who are forward-orientated and make ‘plans for the future’ are, at least ‘in part historically’ conditioned, a conditioning derived ‘from the actor's mental model of the world’ they know, or think they know. The imaginary future is but an extrapolation of our imagined past and, conversely, the future is a projection from ‘an anticipation of where the course of world events is going overall’ (Ch. Guignon). Without doubt, ‘historiography is feasible as an undertaking only if the historian, in looking at the plethora of what has happened in the past, is able to select the events that are to count as historically relevant for a historical account’, which means, historians must always actively evaluate what they are looking at.

The workshop paper elaborates on this outline which will be published as an introduction of the forthcoming book 'M. Vinzent, Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection' (Cambridge University Press).