ABSTRACT
It was certainly alive between the fifth and seventh centuries, and with significant variations that allow people to note certain connections of period, context and use between the Questions and the Lives of saints. A good half of demonology escaped Christianisation, something of which the Lives of saints give no inkling. It was then that hagiography experienced one of its most original flowerings, but also, and consequently, its sharpest criticism and its lowest point in the sources. Once established, the boundaries of hagiography are systematically blurred. One figure remains, or rather comes back to life, from the sixth to at least the ninth century: that of the man of knowledge, initiated without being religious, having power over 'nature', operating transmutations and having a 'scholarly' knowledge of the future, without thereby taking a stance outside Christianity. That most of the Christian emperors of the fifth to seventh centuries surrounded themselves with astrologers is in no way surprising.
