Mystery Monday: Stenent

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.

Sometimes it feels like obscure 16th C English names are the most obscure of all, their obscurity magnified by our familiarity with the language and context in which they occur. Such a name is today’s mystery name:

Just, what, uh, hmm? Is it a scribal error? An editorial error? A weird made-up name? A transferred surname? (would be very odd, that). We have zero idea, which makes this a perfect mystery to include in our list. If you have any thoughts, please share in the comments! We’d love to know.

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Mystery Monday: Perteiza

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.

Today’s mystery is from late 16th C Somerset, and is as far as we can tell a hapax legomenon: We’ve found three records of the name, all to the same person. Perteiza Batten, daughter of Launcellott was christened in Bruton in 1592 (that’s the instance we have in our data). She married Willm. Harlidg in 1608/9, and then in 1638, W^m son of W^m. and Perteza Harledg was buried.

A search of google returns no use of this as a name other than by this woman.

Where on earth did Launcellott Batten find this name? We searched the rest of the register to see if the names of his family members could provide any clue, but didn’t find much. He married Agnes Beastley in 1588, and their first daughter, Joan, was born a year later. Then came Perteiza, Mary in 1594, and Edith 1596. A fifth daughter, Elizabeth, was born and buried in 1599, and he himself died in 1608/9, a month after Perteiza’s marriage.

All the rest of the names are utterly unexceptional in 16th C England. Whither Perteiza? This may be one mystery we never crack.

Mystery Monday: Lyssence

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.

Today’s name is one that we came across quite recently, in the 16th C registers of the parish of Bath.

It’s clearly masculine from context, and also clearly a given name (gotta love parish registers for making both of these things often crystal clear!), but beyond that, we haven’t a clue. It’s a name that nibbles at you and makes you think “surely there’s got to be a straightforward explanation”, the sort of name that sounds like it’s just a word, but there’s no word like “lyssence” or “lissence” in any dictionary we’ve checked, and plugging the word into google gets modern social media handles and nothing more.

Do you recognise the name? Have any thought as to its origin? We’d love to know! Please share in the comments.

What makes the Apocrypha apocryphal?

As I continue doing data-collection and reading for the paper on Protestant vs. Puritan names I’m working on, I’ve run up against an interesting issue about the categorisation of Biblical names, especially those of Hebrew origin.

You might think that every Biblical name could be neatly categorised into “Old Testament” or “New Testament” (or maybe “both” if it turns up in both), but it turns out, this classification will only get you so far, because some of the traditional “Biblical” names are not actually found in the Bible! Or rather, not found in the canonical Bible…Three classic examples are Judith, Anna/Anne, and Susan. The Judith and Susanna whose popularity translated into use of their names are not mentioned in the canonical Old Testament; nor is Mary’s mother’s name given in the canonical New Testament. Nevertheless Judith, Susan(na) and Anne are generally counted as “Biblical” names, because of their occurrence in books that used to be considered canonical but no longer are (the Apocrypha).

As we try to provide an analysis of the distinctly Protestant Biblical names used in the 16th C, we are thus faced with the question of “what counts as Biblical?” That is, what apocryphal and deuterocanonical books would the Protestants have accepted as canonical? This question led us to the article we’re discussing in today’s post:

Floyd C. Medford, “The Apocrypha in the Sixteenth Century: A Summary and Survey”, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 52, no. 4 (December, 1983): 343-354.

(Isn’t it great when you’ve got a concrete question and someone has a targeted article that is basically designed to answer your question?)

How — and why — then did this shifting understanding of the Apocrypha come about, and how — and why — did it affect the changing namepools? Medford starts out by laying the scene that motivates his investigation:

the sixteenth century witnessed the first serious reconsideration the problem of the Biblical canon in over a thousand years (p. 343).

This reconsider was triggered, Medford argues, by a long-running discrepancy between what the learned fathers of the Church maintained as canonical (that is, the canon of Jerome) and what was incorporated into actual ecclesiastical practice, a broader collection (p. 343). Many medieval Bibles incorporated the Apocrypha without distinction from the canonical books (p. 345), and as a result only scholars could have distinguished the canonical from the apocryphal.

The books labelled as apocryphal in the King James translation of the Bible (and hence typical of the Protestant apocrypha) are:

• I Esdras
• II Esdras
• Tobit
• Judith
• “the rest of Esther”
• Wisdom
• Ecclesiasticus (also known as the Wisdom of Sirach, or Sirach)
• Baruch, with the epistle of Jeremiah
• the Song of the Three Children
• the Story of Susannah
• The Idol Bel, and the Dragon
• The Prayer of Manasses
• I Maccabees
• II Maccabees

In this list, all except I and II Esdras and the prayer of Manasses are books that were considered canonical by the Catholic church.

Medford surveys how over the course of the 16th C the apocryphal books were successively separated out from the canonical books in various Protestant vernacular translations. Luther’s 1534 translation included the books, but provided explanatory prefaces on a number of them decrying them; concluding that “while they are not placed on the same footing as the Holy Scripture, [they] are yet profitable and good for reading” (p. 347). The first edition of the Bible to separate out the apocryphal books from the rest, putting them into their own section, was the Van Liesvelt translation into Dutch (p. 347). Other editions separated them out even further, by moving them after the New Testament in order.

This suspicion (or perhaps “concern with” is better) of the apocryphal books was not specific to the Protestant denominations, with similar sentiments being expressed by Catholic scholars in the early part of the century (p. 348). But the fact that the Protestants abrogated these books was — by the middle of the century — sufficient to reinforce their canonicity in the Catholic tradition, as witnessed by the Council of Trent (p. 348) which affirmed od as the author of all the books of the Old and New Testament as well as the Apocryphal books noted above.

Medford concludes his discussion with a survey of English translations, discussing how and where the apocryphal books were put, and whether they were introduced with a preface (and if so, whether it is the preface of Coverdale or Calvin). From this survey, he concludes:

Thus the sixteenth century English translations generally retain the Apocrypha for church use, while carefully demarking their secondary status by title, preface, position, and/or other means (p. 353).

This holds true for the Protestant tradition; but he goes on to say that the Puritans separated themselves out from the general Protestant tradition “with a complete rejection of the Apocrypha, resulting in the exclusion of those books from many editions of the King James Version since the middle of the seventeenth century” (p. 353). Here then we have the basis for a conjecture: If there is a distinctive Protestant vs. Puritan name-pool, we would expect to see apocryphal names in the former but not in the latter — no more Judiths or Susans or even possibly Annes…

What makes a name a Puritan name?

One of the projects we hope to resurrect this summer with the help of our research interns is a paper on Protestant vs. Puritan names. One of our interns, Adelia, is currently collecting relevant literature, and I’m making an effort to prioritise reading through the fascinating looking articles she’s finding. What better way to do that than to write up commentaries on them as I do so?

Today’s article is

Daniel Kilham Dodge, “Puritan Names”, New England Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1928): 467-475, http://www.jstor.org/stable/359527.

Dodge kicks things off by summarising popular suppositions about Puritan names:

• They are “now regarded as old-fashioned” (p. 467).
• “Most of them come from the Old Testament, especially from the minor prophets” (p. 467).
• “The New Testament is almost as carefully avoided as mine pie at Christmas” (p. 467).

But his purpose in this article is to question this popular opinion:

But what if our modern historians and writers of fiction were wrong in their assumption that, in the naming of their children, the Puritans were a people by themselves and that they were as old-fashioned in their names as in their dress? (p. 467).

Dodge adopts two principles for collecting evidence to demonstrate that this assumption is wrong: that the data be both representative and sufficiently large. A list of a hundred names is not large enough to draw any conclusions from, while a much larger list of names of clergy men will not be representative. With these principles in mind, Dodge draws his data from “copies of official records extending from the earliest entries of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628 throughout the seventeenth century and including various church and town lists and the graduates of Harvard College from 1641 to 1700” (p. 468). With this, Dodge places himself in the century after the terminus of our interest; given the significant cultural differences in England (and English colonies) between the 16th and 17th century, we must be chary of taking for the 16th century any of his conclusions concerning the 17th century.

The data that Dodge collected he divides into four categories (p. 469):

1. Old Testament names
2. New Testament names
3. Non-descriptive profane names
4. Descriptive names (including such names as Deliverance, Hopestill, Satisfaction, and Tremble)

When he considers names in his data that occur 10 or more times, there is a slight preference for Old Testament names (18 vs. 11 or 12, depending on where Joseph is categorised); the numbers shift somewhat when the individual occurrences, as opposed to the distinct names, are counted: 2062 occurrences of New Testament names vs. 1193 occurrences of Old Testament names (p. 469).

The cause of this strange reversal, is, however, not unexpected: It is due to the popularity of the given name John (around 20% of all instances), which was not unique to the Puritans and whose historic popularity even shifting priorities and practices could not shift it from the Puritan naming pool. As Dodge puts it:

the given name John, most popular of names among the Puritans, was not a Puritan name at all (p. 471).

Dodge’s feminine data shows the trends he wants to highlight somewhat stronger than the masculine data, as “the proportion of Biblical names is larger and the Old Testament is more generously represented”, though the smaller numbers overall mean that of names occurring ten times or more, “five are from the Old Testament and four from the New Testament” (p. 472). The clearest demonstration of the trends, though, is the fact that the most popular “profane” (by which Dodge merely means “neither Biblical nor descriptive”) feminine name, Margaret, is only the 10th most popular feminine name (p. 472), compared to the most popular profane masculine name, William, which was the third most popular masculine name (p. 471). From this, Dodge concludes:

early New Englanders, and possibly other Englishmen as well, depended upon the Bible to a greater extent in naming their daughters than their sons (p. 472).

Of the descriptive names, Dodge argues that they were never common and that their status as the “supposedly typical Puritan names” (p. 473) is due to psychological rather than ontological reasons: It is a fact of human consciousness that we tend to fixate upon the unusual and atypical and give it more prominence than it necessarily desires. As he says, “we are all given to generalizing from insufficient data” (p. 473), and when we look at actual numbers and statistics, it is clear that “In the majority of cases Puritans, like Anglicans, chose names not as Puritans but as Englishmen” (p. 473). More controversially, he argues that

Faintnot and Hopefor, Faith and Prudence are quaint, but they are evidently not so typical Puritan names as John and William, Mary and Elizabeth (p. 474).

But while it may be true that these names were all more common amongst Puritans than the descriptive names or names of obscure Old Testament characters, one must be careful what question one is asking when considering the question of whether there is a uniquely or distinctively Puritan pool of names. For it could be either of the following:

1. What is the probability that a person is a Puritan, given the name they bear?
2. What is the probability that a person bears a Puritan name, given that they are Puritan?

It may be that the answer to the former question is “rather low” while the latter question might be “quite high” — there could be names which are distinctively Puritan not in the sense that many Puritans were named this name, but in the sense that no non-Puritans were. It is these latter class of names that are apt to give us a pool which is uniquely or characteristically Puritan.

Mystery Monday: Bye

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.

Today’s name is a fun one, because we’ve got examples from 16th C England and 13th C Germany and we have no idea if they represent the same name or not.

There’s every reason to think that these are distinct names; but there’s also no reason to think that they aren’t the same. This is in part because we have no idea what name this could be; pretty much the only possible possible explanation is that the 16th C English form is a double diminutive of Sibyl via such forms as Sybeye and Sybbie.

Have you got any other ideas? Reasons to think these are the same name? Different names? Please share in the comments!

Mystery Monday: Ymar

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.

Today’s name occurs twice in the registers of the Protestant Church at Caen in the 1560s:

The two references we have are to different men — in 1561, Ymar Le Mercier married Françoise; in 1562, Ymar Malet married Julienne. (Elsewhere in the registers, we find that Ymar and Julienne welcomed a baby girl named Elizabeth in October 1563!)

It’s a name we’ve not otherwise come across in France. Is it a variant of Aymar? A misspelling/misreading/mistranscription of Yvar? The only other instance of this name that we’ve ever found is an early English saint who died around 830. Is it reasonable to think of two 16th C Protestant men being named after an obscured 9th C English saint? (Probably not). Are the two names related? Are they just coincidentally identical?

If you have any thoughts or clues or other examples of the name, please share in the comments!

Mystery Monday: Stethyans

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a typo? Is it a name?

Today’s mystery name comes from a Cornish parish register in the 1580s.

Unless there’s a scribe who’s really confused about how to spell feminine forms of Stephen, we haven’t really any clue what name this is supposed to be, or whether the editor has even managed to represent the original source material correction.

On the other hand, there are some weird and unusual names in Cornwall that turn up in the 16th C, and maybe this is one of them — do we have any Cornish experts reading? If you’ve got any ideas about the origin of this name, please share in the comments!

Mystery Monday: Nodia

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.

16th C English mystery names are loads of fun, because they are the most rare. Today’s name is found in a parish register from St. Antholin, so we have clear gender information — masculine — but no other clue as to the origin, and it’s certainly not a name we’ve found in any other context!

Do you have any thoughts as to the origin of this name? Or found any other examples of it in your own research? Please share in the comments!

Looking into history: Unexpected finds

In this post, we take a look at some of the names in the ONS girls’ names data from England and Wales (up through the first 300) which may surprise some people by turning up in the Middle Ages.

First up is no. 41 Imogen — historically thought to have first appeared post-1600 as a typo in a Shakespearean play, the name has an alternative history, dating back to medieval Germany.

Ancient Greek name Penelope (no. 48) came into use in England in the 16th, part of a fad for classical names. (Nickname Penny (no. 198) is more modern, though.)

No. 65 Ada has an old-fashioned feel to it — but did you know it’s roots go back at least to the 9th C in France?

Biblical names Lydia (no. 130), Leah (no. 136), Esther (no. 173), Naomi (no. 178), Rebecca (no. 186), Tabitha (no. 204), Lois (no. 215), and Rachel (no. 323) became popular amongst French, Dutch, and English Protestants in the 16th C, as did virtue names like Faith (no. 135). Interestingly, Hope (no. 139) is a virtue name that we haven’t yet found any pre-1600 examples of, though Esperanza from Latin sperantia ‘hope’ is found in 15th-16h C Spain and Italy (but not in the ONS data!)

Modern name Ottilie (no. 164) is a variant of medieval Odile, popular in France especially in the diminutive form Odelina.

No. 169 Laura first became popular after Petrarch as the poetic name for his love; it spread from Italy to France, Italy, and England over the 14th and 15th centuries.

Here’s a surprising one: Maia (no. 176). The DMNES entry is still in draft form, but we have two Low German examples from the 16th century; variant Maja (no. 192) is not an unreasonable alternative medieval spelling.

French-origin name Amy (no. 189) was popular in England from the 14th C onwards.

No. 196 Alba occurs in Catalan in the early 16th C.

Golden name Aurelia (no. 212) was used in Renaissance Italy. While name no. 361 Sapphire is generally interpreted as a gem name, when the medieval form Sapphira was used in 16th C England, it was more likely in reference to the New Testament character.

Did you know that Alana (no. 216) is a medieval name? It’s the Latin feminine form of Alan, and appears rarely. (Variants that add extra ls or ns or hs, such as Alannah (no. 472), Alanna (no. 650), Allana (no. 1788), Alanah (no. 1887), and Allanah (no. 3178) and compounds like Alana-Rose (no. 2901) and Alana-Rae (no. 5666) are not generally medieval.)

Nickname Effie (no. 236), usually a pet form of Euphemia (no. 4684), shows up in 16th C England (as does the full name itself) — a rare instance of an -ie or -y diminutive ending in medieval England!

Name no. 243, Talia we have examples of in 13th and 16th C Italy; there’s no entry for the name yet, as the etymological origin of the name is uncertain.

Names of classical gods and goddesses became popular in the Renaissance, including Diana (no. 275) found in both England and Italy (Diane (no. 3178) is a French form; Dianna (no. 3985) and Dyana (no. 48684) are modern forms). In general, the Latin names were preferred over the Greek — which means while we don’t have Athena (no. 239), Atene (no. 5666), Athene (no. 5666) (or the compound Athena-Rose, no. 4684) in the DMNES data, we do have Minerva (no. 2187). (The compound Diana-Elena (no. 5666) is also modern.)

Modern-day Melody (no. 312) is found in the Latin form Melodia in England during the fad for fanciful Latinate names in the 13th C. It’s during this period that we also find Amanda (no. 602).

Name no. 213 Remi shows up in medieval France — but as a masculine name, not a feminine name. Similarly, Alexis (no. 323) can be found right across Europe, but only as a man’s name.

The roots of Christmas name Natalie (no. 354) go all the way back to the early Middle Ages — it shows up multiple times in the 9th C, which makes it an incredibly well-witnessed early French feminine name!

We’ll tackle names from no. 400 down in a future post.