Hermann of Reichenau

Hermann of Reichenau, known in Latin as Hermannus Contractus and in German as Hermann der Lahme, was born in 1013 into the Swabian comital family of Altshausen. His father was Count Wolfrad (also given as Wolverad or Wolfrat) II of Altshausen. From birth he suffered a severe physical disability. Medieval witnesses describe a body so contracted and weakened that he could neither walk nor sit upright without support and had to be carried; his speech was likewise impaired. Modern writers have conjectured cerebral palsy, a spinal malformation, or a neuromuscular disease, but no diagnosis can be established. About 1020, when he was seven years old, his parents placed him in the Benedictine abbey of Reichenau, on an island in Lake Constance, then one of the chief monastic schools of the German kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire.

At Reichenau he received a full education in the liberal arts and in due course made his monastic profession. He remained there for the rest of his life as monk, teacher, and writer. His principal historical work, the Chronicon, is a universal chronicle from the Incarnation to 1054. Historians value it as a relatively sober and well-informed account of events in the Empire, especially under the later Ottonian and early Salian rulers; it was continued after his death by his pupil Berthold of Reichenau. In the exact sciences Hermann wrote on the construction and use of the astrolabe, on the abacus, and on the computus used to fix the date of Easter. These treatises belong to the early Latin reception of Arabic astronomical and mathematical learning in Western Europe.

He was also a poet and musician. Medieval tradition ascribes to him two of the great Marian antiphons of the Roman liturgy, the Salve Regina and the Alma Redemptoris Mater, as well as other sequences, hymns, and offices. Specialists still debate these attributions, but they attest the high regard in which his literary and musical gifts were held. Contemporaries remembered him for patience and cheerfulness amid constant physical suffering. His life thus joined the roles of monk, schoolmaster, historian, scientist, and liturgical poet within eleventh-century Benedictine culture on the German-Swiss frontier of Lake Constance.

Hermann died at Reichenau on 24 September 1054 and was buried at the abbey. He has been venerated locally and in Benedictine calendars as Blessed Hermann of Reichenau, with a feast ordinarily kept on 24 September. No formal papal canonization of the later medieval or Tridentine type is recorded. Popular devotion has long associated him with people who live with serious physical disabilities. His chronicle and his scientific and musical writings remain evidence of the intellectual life of the monastic schools of the Salian age.