ABSTRACT
This opening chapter approaches the corpus via a series of four interlocking questions: who wrote the accounts?; what is their status vis-à-vis potentially competing and conflicting discourses?; when and why were they written? Emphasis is placed on authorial statements located either in paratexts or embedded in the main body of the accounts. These intentional assertions are placed in a dialogue with contemporary debates relating to historiography, memory and identity. The fact that the authors of the accounts occupied complex subject-positions relating to gender, sexuality, nationality, class, political affiliation and identification with Judaism has been bracketed until Chapters 35. Equally, the status of the accounts as textual constructs comprising formal, narrative and rhetorical strategies is deferred until Chapter 2, which thereby constitutes a complement and balance to the focus on authorial intentionality explored here.
