ABSTRACT
The Real Presence is closely connected with the central part of Eucharist, the ritual that celebrates and commemorates the Last Supper, Christ's farewell dinner with his disciples. Paolo Uccello was a fifteenth-century Italian painter with keen interest in perspective. The literature on Uccello's painting includes an essay by New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, 'The Wound in the Wall'. The most famous early challenge to the conversionist view was launched by Berengar of Tours in the eleventh century. It introduced an important philosophical distinction and provoked a debate that threw up the new term 'transubstantiation'. One of the earliest attested conflicts of opinion on the matter emerged as two monks, Ratramnus and Paschasius Radbertus, clashed in the ninth century in the monastery of Corbie in France. Both agreed that some kind of 'mutation' took place in the Eucharist. John Wycliff's and Huldrych Zwingli's understanding of the Real Presence leaves the relation between the bread and wine and the body of Christ underdetermined.
