He is sometimes regarded as the first humanist of the Early Middle Ages because of the quality of his literary style, his love of learning, and his work as a scribe and textual critic.
[citation needed] He began his education at the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul in Ferrières-en-Gâtinais under St. Aldric, then abbot of the monastery.
Abbot Aldric saw fit to send him to deepen his theological education at the Abbey of Fulda under Rabanus Maurus.
During his residence at Fulda (c. 830–36) he became an intimate friend and disciple of the learned Einhard, whose Vita Karoli magni he was one of the first to read and praised it because of its style (epist.
He was interested therefore not only in Christian but also in pagan classical authors and even those who did not belong to the reading canon of the Carolingian schools, such as Suetonius, of whom he was one of very few readers in the early Middle Ages, and Cicero, whose works he seems to know almost in their entirety, not only his better known rhetorical writings, and whom he mentions and cites very often.
One of his other sons, Lothair, recently named as emperor, invaded the western territories of Charles, Louis' designated heir.
His position of abbot was formalized because of an election prompted by Charles the Bald, due to Lupus' ties to his family.
He waged a war of letters to try to regain the land of Ferrieres which had been handed over to a private owner thereby causing the monastery's revenue to drop.
He wrote a letter to the Bishop of Pordalus, begging him to use his authority to influence the king so that he could carry on as an abbot, not as a military leader.
During the war between Charles the Bald and Pepin II of Aquitaine, Lupus was captured at the Battle of Toulouse and held prisoner.
He was also present at several other Church councils, notably that of Soissons in 853, and played an important part in the contemporary controversy regarding predestination.
"Lupus not only took part in the most lively ecclesiastical controversy of his age, but also, by the method of his treatment, showed himself a skilled dialectician at the time when dialectics were still very imperfectly developed.
He occupies a prominent place in medieval literary history, being one of the most cultured and refined men of the ninth century.
Most of these letters were written to church officials, monks in neighboring monasteries, clergymen, Popes Benedict III and Nicholas I, Charles the Bald and Lothair.
Lupus had a rigid adherence to the rules of the Roman grammarians for the division of syllables, whereby any pronounceable group of consonants is placed with the following vowel.