(d. ca. 875). Born in the early 9th century, Ratramnus became a monk at the abbey of Corbie, where he died. One of the most original thinkers of medieval France, he was a friend of Paschasius Radbertus, Gottschalk, and Lupus of Ferrières. A spirited author, he directly confronted Paschasius Radbertus on the eucharist and the virginity of Mary in partu (i.e., during and after Jesus’s birth) and Hincmar of Reims on predestination, the nature of the soul, and (in a lost work) the Trinity. Ra-tramnus warned against “gross corporeality” in eucharistic thought, maintaining the continued reality of the bread and wine, while also asserting the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. His eucharistic treatise was championed by Berengar of Tours and the Protestant Reformers.
He was a favorite of Charles the Bald, and he wrote the Contra Graecorum for Pope Nicholas I, in defense of papal primacy, clerical celibacy, and the use of the filioque (the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son) in the Creed. Ratramnus ridiculed superstition in his treatise on the virginity of Mary and in his Epistola de cynocephalis, concerning the “dog-man” mentioned by Augustine in City of God (De civitate Dei 16.8).
