Note 2804 — Chapter XXX · GERBERT AND THE INTRODUCTION OF ARABIC ASTROLOGY

In a Berlin manuscript of the twelfth century (Berlin 956, fol. 11) there is added a note in a thirteenth century hand recounting the legend that this Hermann was the son of a king and queen and that, his mother having been asked before his birth whether she would prefer a handsome and foolish son or a learned and shamefully ugly one and she having chosen the latter alternative, he was born hunchbacked and lame. It was from this MS of the treatise on the astrolabe that Pertz edited the legend in the Monumenta Germaniae (Scriptores, V, 267). Rose (1905), p. 1179, calls the writer of this note Berengar, too, asking anent the opening words of the note, “De isto hermanno legitur in historia,” “Aus welcher historia hat der Schreiber (Berengarius) seine Fabeln?” The note at the close of the treatise in Digby 174, fol. 210v, gives a different version of the legend, stating that Hermann was a good man and dear to God and that one day an angel offered him his choice between bodily health without great wisdom and the greatest science with corporal infirmity. Hermann chose the latter and afterwards became a paralytic and gouty.