The Middle Ages did not invent the cult of saints, which already, by the end of Christian Antiquity, played an important role in the religious life of the faithful, through the cult rendered to the martyrs and the confessors. Yet this devotion was boosted in the Middle Ages to the point of making it one of the keystones of human relationships with the divine, as we still see today from the innumerable works of art of this period – paintings, sculptures, gold and silver work, windows – dedicated to the menservants and maidservants of God. This cult first took the form of festivals and liturgical ceremonies, which became steadily more numerous between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. By the Carolingian period, in every church, the clergy celebrated the feasts of the Apostles and the Evangelists and also several universal feasts such as All Saints (1 November), St John the Baptist (24 June), St Laurence (10 August), St Michael (29 September), St Martin (11 November) and the Holy Innocents (28 December), added to which were commemorations specific to each church, that is, of its dedicatee and its patron saint or saints.