Rabanus Maurus (or more correctly Hrabanus), a great Carolingian churchman and divine, was born of noble parents at Mainz about 776, and had his education at Fulda and at Tours under Alcuin, who surnamed him Maurus after the favourite disciple of St Benedict. He was next placed at the head of his school at Fulda, where he trained scholars like Walafrid Strabo and Otfrid of Weissenburg. In 822 he became abbot, but resigned in 842 to retire to the neighbouring cloister of Petersberg, whence in 847 he was called to the archbishopric of Mainz. The chief event of his reign was his severity against the too logical monk Gottschalk for his views on predestination. He died in 856. His writings show erudition but little originality. They include Commentaries on the Old Testament, St Matthew, and St Paul's Epistles, homilies, doctrinal treatises, hymns, and a Latin-German glossary to the Bible (Graff's Diutiska, vol. iii.). Among these are De Institutione Clericorum, and De Universo Libri xxvii., sive Etymologiarum Opus, a kind of encyclopaedia of its time.
His Opera Omnia (so called) fill vols. cvii.-cxii. of Migne's Patrologie Cursus Completus—a reprint of the Cologne edition of Colvenerius (6 vols. folio, 1627), to which are prefaced the Lives by his disciple Rudolphus and by Joannes Trithemius. See the studies by Spengler (1856), Köhler (1870), and Richter (1882).