Lambert of Hersfeld (also called Lampert; – 1082/85) was a medieval chronicler. His work represents a major source for the history of the German kingdom of Henry IV and the incipient Investiture Controversy in the eleventh century. Life What little is known of his life is revealed in scattered details from his own historical writings. Probably a Franconian by birth, of good family, he prepared for an ecclesiastical career at the cathedral school in Bamberg, where he received tuition by Anno of Steusslingen, the later Archbishop of Cologne. On 15 March 1058 Lambert entered the Benedictine abbey of Hersfeld as a monk. On September 16, he was also ordained as a priest in Aschaffenburg and therefore sometimes called Lampert of Aschaffenburg. After his elevation to the priesthood, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Back in Hersfeld in October 1059, Lambert worked in the cloister library and taught at the monastery school. In 1071 he visited the Benedictine abbeys of Siegburg and Saalfeld to study the Cluniac Reforms, promoted by his mentor Archbishop Anno II of Cologne. However, Lambert adhered to traditional Benedictine rules and remained reserved towards monastic reforms. Lambert was a convinced opponent of the German king Henry IV. In 1077, during the rising conflict with Pope Gregory VII, he moved from Hersfeld to the canon monastery of Hasungen at the instigation of Henry's enemy Archbishop Siegfried I of Mainz. He turned Hasungen into a Benedictine abbey, settled with monks descending from Hirsau. A variety of circumstantial evidence suggests that from 1081, Lambert even served as the first abbot. He probably died shortly afterwards, no later than in 1085. Historical works Lambert is most famous as the author of an extensive historical chronicle known as the Annales, first published in 1525 by Kaspar Currer in Tübingen. They were edited in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, along with Lampert's other known works, by Oswald Holder-Egger (MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usu scholarum, vol. 38) in 1894. Holder-Egger, in his edition of Lampert's work, also demonstrated that Lampert was the likely author of at least two other significant works: the Vita Lulli archiepiscopi Mogontiacensis, a hagiography of the founder of Hersfeld Abbey, Saint Lullus, Archbishop of Mainz (c. 710–786), and a shorter, polemic history of the Hersfeld monastery (Libellus de institutione Herveldensis ecclesiae), which survives only fragmentarily in excerpts made by later medieval German writers. Lambert's history of the Germans, De rebus