Lunch & Learn | Sacraments, Scripture, and the Eucharistic Controversy in the Early Middle Ages

Our 2026-2027 Faculty Lunch & Learn Series continues with Dr. Hannah Matis

In the early Middle Ages, monasteries were both strongholds of literacy, book-making, and scholarship, and missionary centers of outreach making large numbers of new converts to Christianity.  The center of intellectual life in this period was the study of the Bible.  This period would also see the first treatise on, and controversy about, the Eucharist in the medieval West, pre-dating later scholastic theories about transubstantiation.  This talk examines what was at stake in the ninth-century debates, what was argued during the eucharistic controversy, and the strange afterlife of these debates resurrected in the English Reformation.