Theology, Rhetoric, and Politics in the Eucharistic Controversy, 1078-1079

In the concluding stages of the eleventh-century Eucharistic Controversy, which turned on whether, and how, sacramental consecration changed the nature of bread and wine at the altar, Alberic of Monte Cassino composed a small but important treatise. Alberic was the most renowned teacher of rhetoric in his time, and his treatise, buttressed by appeal to the authority of the Church Fathers, was said by contemporaries to have "utterly destroyed" the argument of his opponent, Berengar of Tours, that