A Scholar Confined to Reichenau

Hermann was born into a noble family in 1013 with a congenital disability, described in near contemporary accounts as leaving him largely unable to walk and able to speak only with considerable difficulty, and was placed as a child oblate at the Benedictine abbey of Reichenau, an island monastery in Lake Constance already established as a center of learning, where he remained for the whole of his life. Despite his physical limitations, or according to his own students in spite of the great effort they cost him, Hermann became one of the most broadly accomplished scholars of his generation, producing a chronicle of world history from the birth of Christ to his own time that later medieval historians valued particularly for its careful attention to chronological accuracy, along with treatises on the astrolabe, on arithmetic, and on music theory that address the practical mathematics of tuning and notation. His students, including the chronicler Berthold of Reichenau, wrote admiringly of both his intellectual range and the physical difficulty under which he worked, and the epithet Contractus, meaning drawn together or crippled, attached to his name in recognition of that disability rather than as any kind of insult, becoming simply part of how he was known to later readers. He died in 1054, and Reichenau's own necrology and the writings of his students remain the primary sources for what is known about his life.