Hermann of Reichenau (also called Hermannus Contractus or Hermannus Augiensis) (1013 July 18 – 1054 September 24) was an 11th century scholar, composer, music theorist, mathematician, and astronomer. Hermannus was a son of the duke of Altshausen. He was crippled by a paralytic disease from early childhood. He spent most of his life in the abbey of Reichenau, an island on Lake Constance. Hermannus contributed to all four arts of the quadrivium. He was renowned as a musical composer (among his surviving works are officia for St. Afra and St. Wolfgang). He also wrote a treatise on the science of music, several works on geometry and arithmetics and astronomical treatises (including instructions for the construction of an astrolabe, at the time a very novel device in Christian Europe). As a historian, he wrote a detailed chronicle from the birth of Christ to his own present day, for the first time compiling the events of the 1st millennium AD scattered in various chronicles in a single work, ordering them after the reckoning of the Christian era. His disciple Berthold of Reichenau was its continuator.
He was beatified (cultus confirmed) in 1863.
HERMANN OF REICHENAU (HERIMANNUS AUGIENSIS), commonly distinguished as Hermannus Contractus, i.e. the Lame (1013-1054), German scholar and chronicler, was the son of Count Wolferad of Alshausen in Swabia. Hermann, who became a monk of the famous abbey of Reichenau, is at once one of the most attractive and one of the most pathetic figures of medieval monasticism. Crippled and distorted by gout from his childhood, he was deprived of the use of his legs; but, in spite of this, he became one of the most learned men of his time, and exercised a great personal and intellectual influence on the numerous band of scholars he gathered round him. He died on the 24th of September 1054, at the family castle of Alshausen near Biberach. Besides the ordinary studies of the monastic scholar, he devoted himself to mathematics, astronomy and music, and constructed watches and instruments of various kinds.
His chief work is a Chronicon ad annum 1054, which furnishes important and original material for the history of the emperor Henry III. The first edition, from a MS. no longer extant, was printed by J. Sichard at Basel in 1529, and reissued by Heinrich Peter in 1549 another edition appeared at St Blaise in 1790 under the supervision of Ussermann; and a third, as a result of the collation of numerous MSS., forms part of vol. v. of Pertz's Monumenta Germaniae historica. A German translation of the last is contributed by K. F. A. Nobbe to Die Geschichtsschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit (1st ed., Berlin, 1851; 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1893). The separate lives of Conrad II. and Henry III., often ascribed to Hermann, appear to have perished. His treatises De mensura astrolabii and De utilitatibus astrolabii (to be found, on the authority of Salzburg MSS., in Pez, Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus, iii.) being the first contributions of moment furnished by a European to this subject, Hermann was for a time considered the inventor of the astrolabe. A didactic poem from his pen, De octo vitiis principalibus, is printed in Haupt's Zeitschrift fur deutsches Alterthum (vol. xiii.); and he is sometimes credited with the composition of the Latin hymns Veni Sancte Spiritus, Salve Regina, and Alma Redemptoris. A martyrologium by Hermann was discovered by E. Diimmler in a MS. at Stuttgart, and was published by him in " Das Martyrologium Notkers and seine Verwandten in Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, xxv. (Göttingen, 1885).
See H. Hansjakob, Herimann der Lahme (Mainz, 1875); Potthast„ Bibliotheca med. aev. s. " Herimannus Augiensis."
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