ADAM OF BREMEN (died c. 1076), historian and geographer, was, according to one tradition, born at Meissen (Saxony) before 1045. In 1069 he appears as a canon of Bremen and master of the cathedral school. On the death of Adalbert, archbishop of Bremen, in 1072, he began the Historia Hamma burgensis Ecclesiae, which he finished about 1075. Adam's Historia—known also as Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Ponti ficum, Bremensium praesulum Historia, and Historia ecclesiastica —is a primary authority, not only for the great diocese of Hamburg-and-Bremen, hut for all North German and Baltic lands (down to 1072), and for the Scandinavian colonies as far as America.
Here occurs the earliest mention of Vinland, and here are also references of great interest to Russia and Kiev, to the heathen Prussians, the Wends and other Slav races of the South Baltic coast, as well as to Finland, Thule or Iceland, Greenland and the Polar seas, which Harald Hardrada and_ the nobles of Frisia had attempted to explore in Adam's own day (before 1066). Adam's account of North European trade at this time, and especially of the great markets of Jumne at the mouth of the Oder, of Birka in Sweden and of Ostrogard (Old Novgorod?) in Russia, is also of much value.
His work, which places him among the first and best of German annalists, consists of four books or parts, and is compiled partly from written records, and partly from oral information mainly gathered from experience or at the courts of Adalbert and Sweyn Estrithson, king of Denmark. Of his minor informants he names several, such as Adelward, dean of Bremen, and William the Englishman, "bishop of Zealand," formerly chancellor of Canute the Great, and an intimate of Sweyn Estrithson. The fourth (per haps the most important) book of Adam's History, variously entitled Libellus de Situ Daniae et reliquarum quae trans Daniam sent regionum, Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis, etc., has often been considered, but wrongly, as a separate work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Ten MSS. exist, of which the chief are Bibliography.—Ten MSS. exist, of which the chief are Copenhagen, Royal Library, Old Royal Collection, No. 2296, of 12th to 13th cents.; No. 718, of 15th cent.; (3) Leyden University, Voss. Lat. 123, of 11th cent.; (4) Rome, Vatican Library, 2010 ; (5) Vienna, Hof-u. Staatsbibliothek, 413, of 13th cent.; (6) Wolfenbiittel, Ducal Library, Gud. 83, of 15th cent. There are 15 editions of the Historia, in whole or part ; the first published at Copenhagen, 1579 (the first of the Libellus or Descriptio Ins. Aquil. appeared at Stockholm in 1615), the best at Hanover (1846, by Lappenberg, in Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum; re-issued by L. Weiland, 1876), and at Paris, 1884 (in Migne's Patrologia Latina, cxlvi.). See also Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, ii. 554-48 (1900.