Adam of Bremen

Adam lived and worked in the second half of the eleventh century, a chronicler attached to the church in Bremen. His major work, the Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, tracked the deeds of Hamburg's bishops — a regional history that would have stayed obscure if not for one chapter. In it, he recorded what he'd heard about Vinland, the Norse settlement across the Atlantic, making him the first European writer to document the continent's existence. He died between 1081 and 1085, leaving behind what scholars now call one of the foremost historical and ethnographic records of the medieval…