A New Birth and a New Death On Christmas Day in the year 800 CE, the Roman Empire was proclaimed to be reborn. The Frankish king Charlemagne, a fierce conqueror and the ruler of most of western Europe, had travelled to Rome, and there Pope Leo III declared him Roman emperor, his collection of loosely controlled lands being dubbed the Holy Roman Empire. The coronation was questionable for a number of reasons, not the least

It could be said that, throughout history and even now in the “less enlightened” parts of the world, the cults of the Saints drive not only the practice of Christianity but also speculation (in the older, more revered sense of the term) about Christianity itself. That is, hagiography as such – the vitae Sanctorum – is not a strange collection of bygone myths (in the newer, less revered sense of the term), but the pulse