Haimo of Auxerre

Haimo was a monk and schoolmaster at the abbey of Saint-Germain in Auxerre, in Burgundy, working roughly between 840 and 865. Almost nothing personal about him survives: no birth date, no family, no account of his death, which is placed somewhere in the 860s or 870s. He may have ended his life as abbot of Sasceium (Cessy-les-Bois). That is the whole biographical record.

His school, though, is well documented, and it was one of the best in Europe. Auxerre in the ninth century produced a line of teachers, Haimo, then his pupil Heiric, then Remigius, who between them worked through most of the Bible and much of classical grammar and logic. Haimo stands at the head of that line.

What he did was practical. He wrote commentaries for students: on Genesis, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the twelve minor prophets, the Song of Songs, all of Paul's letters, and Revelation, plus a set of homilies covering the church year. His method was to explain the plain sense first, the grammar, the historical situation, who is speaking to whom, before moving to the spiritual meaning. He wrote clearly and he did not show off. That is why he was copied.

His commentary on Paul was especially widely used. Generations of monks learned Romans and Galatians through Haimo's paraphrase, and the compilers of the Glossa ordinaria, the standard marginal notes of the later Middle Ages, drew on him heavily. Through the Gloss, his readings reached every medieval university, and eventually the desks of the sixteenth-century Reformers.

He got almost no credit for any of it. The manuscripts confused his name with that of Haymo, bishop of Halberstadt, who had died in 853, and the confusion stuck for about a thousand years. When his commentaries were printed in the sixteenth century, they went out under the bishop's name. Only in the twentieth century did scholars sort out which works belonged to the schoolmaster of Auxerre, and the reassignment is still being refined.

There is something fitting about it. He wrote to make Scripture usable for men who would never be famous, and the work outlived his own name.

Sources: Migne, Patrologia Latina, vols. 116–117 (printed under the name of Haymo of Halberstadt); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; John J. Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon; Dominique Iogna-Prat et al., L'école carolingienne d'Auxerre.