Adam of Bremen

Adam of Bremen , chronicler and geographer of XIe century, native of high the Saxony.

It came to Bremen about the year 1067, and was successively made there name Chanoine, then principal of the city. It is by exerting these functions that he wrote an ecclesiastical history in four books, in which he treats origin and propagation of the Christian religion in the septentrional countries of Europe, and particularly in the dioceses of Bremen and Hamburg, since the reign of Charlemagne to the emperor Henri IV. This great work ends in a small treaty on the geographical location of the Denmark and other countries which border it; it speaks there successively nature about the country, religion and manners of the inhabitants.

These two works are very considered and full with curious, but sometimes erroneous information. Adam did not know the country only it describes; he even seems that he never went there, and than the information of which it was used for to write on the nations of North were provided to him by the Christian preachers that Rome and the Germany often sent towards the septentrional people, and who, on their return, almost always passed by Bremen which, already at that time, was an important city.

Works

Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, ED. G. Waitz (Scriptores rerum germanicarum, 1876)

- French Translation: * History of the archbishops of Hamburg, followed by Descriptiion of the islands of North, translated from Latin, annotated and presented by J-B Brunet-Jailly. Gallimard, collection the Paddle of the people Paris (1998) ISBN 2-07-074464-7

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