ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what can be learned by applying Thomas Kuhn's template, with modifications, to the unlikely story of how a weighty theological book from the "Dark Ages" became a fulcrum for paradigm change in the era of the Scientific Revolution. Claiming to come from Charlemagne universally acknowledged as a founder of Western Christendom, polemicists of all parties to the wars of religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seized upon his name to justify themselves. The Buddha's parable accents the fact that preconceptions dominated identity construction, above all when new experiences were being grafted onto well-established identities. The New Method was invented by one of the most celebrated Catholic evangelists of his day, Franois Vron a Jesuit whose calling and greatest triumphs were in the re-conversion of Protestants. Reconstructing narratives of their own people and homeland, both Nifanius and Schaten devised ways in which to work the Saxon War into their portrayals of Charlemagne.
