I had never heard of Hermann until coming across a reference to him in a a talk by Father Patrick Henry Reardon (a priest of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America).
Hermann (1013-1054) was a chronicler, mathematician, and poet. The son of of a Count, he was a cripple from birth (hence 'Contractus'). He had a cleft palate, cerebral palsy and was powerless to move without assistance. It was only by the greatest effort that he was able to read and write, having only three working fingers on one hand. He was educated on the Monastic Island of Reichenau in Lake Constance (south-west Germany).
He took the monastic vows in 1043, and seems to have spent the rest of his life there. Despite his handicaps and losing his sight towards the end of his life, he was to excel in theology, mathematics, astronomy, music, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. He is the author of the earliest of the medieval universal chronicles. Hermann also wrote mathematico-astronomical works and he constructed astronomical and musical instruments. He also composed religious hymns and is credited with the authorship of the Alma Redemptoris Mater and the Salve Regina.
His story reminds me of someone I discovered in the early 1980s, Christopher Nolan (1965-2005). Nolan was born with cerebral palsy, and could only move his head and eyes. Due to the severity of the palsy, he used a wheelchair. He was placed on medication that relaxed him so he could use a pointer attached to his head to type. Nolan used a special computer and keyboard; in order to help him type, his mother held his head in her cupped hands while Christopher painstakingly picked out each word, letter by letter, with a pointer attached to his forehead. At the age of fifteen, he published his collection of poems titled Dam-Burst of Dreams. He wrote an account of his childhood, Under the Eye of the Clock, published by St. Martin's Press, which won him the UK's Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1987 at the age of 21.
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