Haymo of Halberstadt

Haymo was born in the late eighth century, became a monk at Fulda, and studied there alongside Rabanus Maurus under Alcuin's pupils. He was sent for a time to Tours. In 840 he was made bishop of Halberstadt, in Saxony, a frontier diocese in country that had been forcibly Christianized within living memory, and he governed it until his death in 853.

As a bishop he built. He raised the cathedral at Halberstadt, endowed churches, and worked at the slow task of turning a conquered province into a Christian one.

His fame, though, rests on a body of biblical commentary that medieval Europe read constantly: expositions of the Psalms, of Isaiah, of the Song of Songs, of the twelve minor prophets, of the Pauline epistles, of Revelation, along with homilies for the church year and a compact universal history.

Here is where honesty is required. Much of that body of work is now assigned to a different man. Modern scholarship has shown that most of the commentaries circulating for a thousand years under the name of Haymo of Halberstadt were in fact written by Haimo of Auxerre, a monk and teacher who worked at the abbey of Saint-Germain d'Auxerre in the middle of the same century. The two names are the same name; the manuscripts confused them early; the printed editions of the sixteenth century fixed the confusion in place.

So the honest account of Haymo of Halberstadt is a double one. He was a real and effective Carolingian bishop, a product of Fulda under Rabanus, a builder of a frontier church, and a man his contemporaries thought learned. He is also the name under which a large and genuinely influential corpus of exegesis travelled through the Middle Ages, was quarried by the compilers of the great Bible glosses, was printed at Cologne and Strasbourg, and was read by the Reformers, even though the hand that wrote most of it belonged to another monk two hundred miles away.

That is a common medieval situation and worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Books moved under the name of whoever was famous enough to carry them. Sorting out who actually wrote what has taken scholars several centuries, and is not finished.

Haymo died on 26 March 853 at Halberstadt.

Sources: Migne, Patrologia Latina, vols. 116–118; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV.