Hermann of Reichenau

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Hermann of Reichenau — known in Latin as Hermannus Contractus, “Hermann the Lame” — was an eleventh-century German Benedictine monk and one of the most accomplished scholars of his age: a chronicler, mathematician, astronomer, music theorist, and student of the calendar. He lived from 1013 to 1054 and spent almost his whole life inside the abbey on the island of Reichenau, in Lake Constance, where he had been given over as a child.

The byname records a fact about his body. Hermann was severely disabled from early childhood — by a condition that left him barely able to move or speak clearly, so that contemporaries marvelled that a mind of such reach worked through a frame so constrained. His pupil Berthold, who wrote the account on which most of what is known of him depends, describes a man carried from place to place and able to write only with difficulty, yet producing across his short life a body of learning that ranged over the whole curriculum of the medieval schools.

That curriculum is where his interest for the history of esoteric thought lies. Hermann worked at the centre of the quadrivium — arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy — the fourfold mathematical learning that monastic Europe had inherited, by way of Boethius, from the late-antique Platonist tradition. He wrote on the astrolabe, the instrument for modelling the turning heavens, and on computus, the demanding art of reckoning the date of Easter and ordering sacred time against the motions of sun and moon. He composed treatises on musical theory in which the ratios of intervals are read as expressions of number. Behind all of this stood an old conviction, never stated as the treatises’ subject but everywhere assumed: that the cosmos is built on proportion, and that the same numbers govern the scale, the year, and the sky. Later astrology and number-symbolism drew on exactly this apparatus of instruments and reckonings, though Hermann himself pursued it as orthodox science in the service of the Church’s calendar.

He is also remembered, by long tradition, as a hymn-writer. The Marian antiphons Salve Regina and Alma Redemptoris Mater have for centuries been ascribed to him, and the attribution still circulates widely; modern scholarship treats it as uncertain rather than secure, since the early evidence is thin and the same hymns are credited elsewhere. What is firmer is the Chronicon, his universal chronicle running from the birth of Christ to his own day, a careful work of dating that later medieval historians used and extended.

Hermann was beatified in the nineteenth century and is venerated in his region as Blessed Hermann. He belongs to the line of monastic scholars through whom the mathematical and astronomical learning of antiquity survived the early Middle Ages — the learning on which later cosmological and divinatory speculation would build. He died at forty-one, and Berthold records that he met the end he had long expected with composure.

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