Dorothea Weltecke has remarked that we should not think of ecclesiastical history as a tree that grows from a single root in the Acts of the Apostles and Eusebius. As she argues, we may be better off thinking of churches as networks of individuals or as a bamboo forest, of distinct institutions planted in the same soil.1 However, as a historiography, ecclesiastical history does present itself as a single tree, to follow Weltecke’s analogy, some of whose branches withered away as they abandoned ‘orthodoxy’. Our challenge, therefore, is to write a history of the historians as image makers, emphasising their continuity with the past, while acknowledging that the raw material from which they constructed this image, often the events of their own times, forced innovation, some of it conscious and some of it unconscious.