What happened AFTER the fall of the Roman empire in the West? Martin Luther and Dr. Barnes do not come on stage for eleven hundred years! Those eleven centuries hold the key to the how and why of many of our current attitudes, customs, and legal and educational institutions. They offer us students baffling periods of darkness and perplex questions about daily life and social arrangements; but there are also great periods of artistic and architectural creativity, of learning and new ideas, of inventions and scientific discoveries, of geographic expansion. There is war, famine, plague, death, corruption, torture, superstition, witchcraft (cf. today's Charlotte Observer!), but they have a unique context in an age united in one faith.