The authenticity of the edicts and the other texts emanating from Constantine the Great which Eusebius cites is now generally accepted, but the implications of Eusebius' penchant for citing primary sources in extenso and his largely scrupulous reproduction of them have yet to be fully fathomed. This, at least, is the thesis of I. Vashcheva. She polemicises with the view that Eusebius was deeply imbued with the assumptions and working methods of classical historians, and that, writing and revising his work in fluctuating circumstances, he lacked a coherent, overarching vision of history. Unlike many Greco-Roman reconstructions of past events, Eusebius' historical works lack set-piece speeches or the invocation of eyewitness reports. Thus there are only thirteen references to oral sources in the entire Church history, and Eusebius is also sparing in his use of his own experience, even though he had observed the aftermath of martyrdoms. Scrutinising Eusebius' terminology, Vashcheva shows that he puts to new uses terms such as kairos and dikē. The latter term was going out of fashion in contemporaneous pagan writings. Eusebius, in contrast, found its connotation of strength and punishment conducive to his themes of providence and God's hand at work in earthly phenomena, making ‘History’ a kind of record of divine rewards and punishments. Vashcheva argues that through such recasting of terminology as well as presentation of sources en masse, Eusebius envisages recent events as the fulfilment of prophecies made in the Scriptures, and thus as the protraction of sacred time. For these extraordinary events, the triumph of the Word, new ‘scriptures’ were needed, with ample documentation and close attention to chronology. Eusebius' fulsome praise for Josephus' Jewish war registers conscious indebtedness to his model of a people experiencing terrible reverses as part of God's plan in a supposedly post-biblical era. Vashcheva might have strengthened her case by some reference to G. Dagron's Emperor and priest (Cambridge 2003), wherein the appeal of Old Testament kingship to strong-minded emperors from Constantine onwards is magisterially expounded. As it stands, this work makes a stimulating contribution to the controversy over Eusebius' vision of history and it should repay the labours of enterprising western translators and publishers.