How medieval is “Your Medieval Name”?

There’s a meme (due to www.abbeytournament.com) that’s been circulating around Facebook sporadically recently, allowing people to generate their “medieval name” according to their birthday. You’ve probably seen it:

The first time it came up in a group that a couple DMNES staff are members of — a group not devoted to either the Middle Ages or to names — one editorial assistant put out a cry for “HALP”, and another swooped in with documentation. Now every time that meme comes around, we’re reminded of that thread, and finally decided to make a blog post out of it!

So, how medieval is “Your Medieval Name”? Actually, pretty medieval!

The feminine names are almost all good solid choices for late medieval England or France:

• Milicent – Yes, medieval!
• Alianor – Yes, medieval!
• Ellyn – Yes, medieval!
• Sybbyl – Yes, medieval!
• Jacquelyn – Yes, medieval!
• Catherine – Yes, medieval!
• Elizabeth – Yes, medieval!
• Thea – Possibly medieval but we’ve not found any evidence for it yet.
• Lucilla – Sort of medieval: R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright, The Roman Inscriptions of Britain I: Inscriptions on Stone — Epigraphic Indexes (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), RIB 1288 and 1271, note one Iulia Lucilla in a first- to fourth-century British inscription (in this name, Lucilla appears as a cognomen), and another Romano-British inscription mentioning a woman known only as [L]ucilla.
• Mary – Yes, medieval!
• Arabella – Yes, medieval: E.G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). s.n. Arabel(la) has a 13th C Latin example of the name.
• Muriel – Yes, medieval: A variety of forms can be found in P.H. Reaney & R.M. Wilson, A Dictionary of English Surnames (London: Routledge, 1991).
• Isabel – Yes, medieval!
• Angmar – Um, no.
• Isolde – Yes, medieval!
• Eleanor – Yes, medieval!
• Josselyn – Yes, medieval, but not as a feminine name.
• Margaret – Yes, medieval!
• Luanda – Um, no.
• Ariana – Not medieval: It’s a modern Italian form of the Greek name Ariadne, found in mythology, and in the Greek and Byzantine empires.
• Clarice – Yes, medieval!
• Idla – Possibly medieval. It appears that this googlebook has a Polish example of the name, but we have not been able to get more than a snippet view, to be able to confirm the date and context.
• Claire – Yes, medieval!
• Rya – Um, no.
• Joan – Yes, medieval!
• Clemence – Yes, medieval!
• Morgaine – Yes, medieval, but only used in literature, and not by real people.
• Edith – Yes, medieval!
• Nerida – Definitely not.
• Ysmay – Yes, medieval: Withycombe (op. cit.) has an example of this spelling.

The masculine names don’t fare quite so well.

• Ulric – Yes, medieval!
• Baird – Yes, medieval, but only as a surname, not as a given name. It is derived from Old French baiard or baiard ‘bay-colored’.
• Henry – Yes, medieval!
• Oliver – Yes, medieval
• Fraden – Possibly medieval, but only as a surname, not as a given name.
• John – Yes, medieval!
• Geoffrey – Yes, medieval!
• Francis – Yes, medieval!
• Simon – Yes, medieval!
• Fendel – Not medieval to my knowledge, either as a given name or a surname.
• Frederick – Yes, medieval!
• Thomas – Yes, medieval!
• Arthur – Yes, medieval!
• Cassius – More Roman than medieval.
• Richard – Yes, medieval!
• Matthew – Yes, medieval!
• Charles – Yes, medieval!
• Reynard – Yes, medieval!
• Favian – Sort of medieval, if you take it as a variant of Fabian.
• Philip – Yes, medieval!
• Zoricus – Not medieval to our knowledge, but it could possibly turn up at some point in future research.
• Carac – Not medieval
• Sadon – Not medieval
• Alistair – Medieval, but not as the nominative form of the name, only as the genitive.
• Caine – Yes, medieval, but only as a surname, not as a given name.
• Gawain – Yes, medieval!
• Godfrey – Yes, medieval!
• Mericus – More Roman than medieval.
• Rowley – Yes, medieval, but only as a surname, not as a given name.
• Brom – Yes, medieval, but only as a surname, not as a given name.
• Cornell – Yes, medieval, but only as a surname, not as a given name.

All the surnames are fine for 14th-16th C English, except these:

• Cabrera – This is Spanish, and would only have been used by women; the masculine form is Cabrero.
• Coastillon – Not quite sure what this is but it looks like a misspelling of some French place name.

An onomastic calendar: June

• June 1: Anne Boleyn was crowned queen of England in 1533.
• June 2: Richilda of Provence died in 910.
• June 3: Peter Abelard was condemned as a heretic in 1141.
• June 4: Adela of Champagne died in 1206.
• June 5: Saint Boniface was murdered in Frisia in 754.
• June 6: Gustav I of Sweden was elected king in 1523.
• June 7: Robert the Bruce died in 1329.
• June 8: Italian poet Gabriello Chiabrera was born in 1552.
• June 9: Irish saint and missionary Columba died in 597.
• June 10: Frederick Barbarossa drowned crossing a river in 1190.
• June 11: Blessed Yolanda of Poland died in 1298.
• June 12: Cosimo dei Medici was born in 1519.
• June 13: Wat Tyler led the Peasant’s Revolt into London in 1381.
• June 14: Orlande de Lassus, Flemish painter, died in 1594.
• June 15: Lisa del Giocondo was born in 1479.
• June 16: Saint Lutgardis died in 1246.
• June 17: Bolesław I the Brave died in 1025.
• June 18: Painter Rogier van der Weyden died in 1464.
• June 19: Saint Juliana Falconieri died in 1341.
• June 20: Blessed Margareta Ebner died in 1351.
• June 21: Leonhard Rauwolf was born in 1535 and Leonardo Loredan died in 1521.
• June 22: Saint Alban was martyred, in an uncertain year between around 209 and 304.
• June 23: Saint Æþelðryþe died in 679.
• June 24: Philippa Hainault was born in 1314.
• June 25: Eleanor of Provence died in 1291.
• June 26: Roman emperor Julian died in 363.
• June 27: The martyrdom of Crescens is celebrated.
• June 28: Charlotte queen of Cyprus was born in 1444.
• June 29: Abel, king of Denmark, died in 1252.
• June 30: Saint Theobald of Provins died in 1066.

An onomastic calendar: October

• October 1: Edgar I was crowned King of the English in 959.
• October 2: Athalaric, king of the Ostrogoths, died in 543.
• October 3: Saint Francis of Assisi died in 1226.
• October 4: Saint Theresa of Avila died in 1582
• October 5: Alexios III of Trebizond was born in 1338.
• October 6: Samuel Tsar of Bulgaria died in 1014.
• October 7: Frederick I of Norway and Denmark was born in 1471.
• October 8: Demetrius Zvonimir was crowned king of Croatia in 1076.
• October 9: Denis, the Poet King of Portugal, was born in 1261.
• October 10: Pope Valentine died in 827.
• October 11: Pope Boniface died in 1303.
• October 12: Edwin King of Northumbria was killed in battle in 632/633.
• October 13: Eleanor, Queen of Castile, was born in 1162.
• October 14: William the Bastard won the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
• October 15: Pope Gregory XIII’s calendrical reform came into use in 1582.
• October 16: Jadwiga was crowned King of Poland in 1384.
• October 17: St. Ivo of Kermartin was born in 1253.
• October 18: Dagobert I was crowned king of the Franks in 629.
• October 19: St. Frideswide died in 727.
• October 20: Henry X of Bavaria died in 1139.
• October 21: Ferdinand Magellan discovered the Straits of Magellan in 1520.
• October 22: Charles Martel, king of the Franks, died in 741.
• October 23: Sweyn III of Denmark is killed in 1157.
• October 24: (DMNES team was out of town w/o internet access).
• October 25: Henry V of England defeated the French at Agincourt in 1415.
• October 26: Feast day of St Demetrius of Thessaloniki, who died in 306.
• October 27: Emperor Constantine had his Vision of the Cross in 312.
• October 28: Margaret I of Denmark died in 1412.
• October 29: Conradin, king of Sicily and Jerusalem, died in 1268.
• October 30: Cesare Borgia hosted the Banquet of Chestnuts in 1501.
• October 31: Nikephoros I became Byzantine emperor in 802.

The “most popular” names, for men

Last week we investigated the ‘most popular’ medieval names for women, including a long discursus on why the scare quotes. All the same caveats hold when we turn to look at the men’s names: Without access to systematic data that counts individuals only once and provides the same level of coverage in every place and time, there is no way to say definitively what the most popular medieval given names were.

Unsurprisingly, the list of men’s names that I review on a daily basis because I can pretty much guarantee some editorial assistant has added new citations of is longer than the list of women’s name. And many of the names on it will strike few as surprising (though I personally find it interesting how they cluster into pairs or triples in terms of the letter they start with, and how weighted towards the end of the alphabet they are):

• Charles
• Henry
• Jacob
• John
• Paul
• Peter
• Philip
• Richard
• Robert
• Roger
• Thomas
• Walter
• William

These names have remained enduringly popular, with all of them showing up in, e.g., the top 100 of the Top Names Over the Last 100 Years in the US (John: 2; Robert, 3; William, 5; Richard: 7; Charles, 9; Thomas, 10; Paul: 17; Jacob: 34; Henry: 52; Peter: 55; Walter, 57; Roger, 66; Philip, ; 94note that since this counts individual variant spellings, rather than combining all variants together, this list separates Jacob from James, which comes in at no. 1).

But others on the list may be more surprising — names that have fallen out of common use, or which while still familiar nowadays may not strike one as especially typical of the Middle Ages. These names are:

• Arnold
• Arnulf
• Frederick
• Gerard
• Louis
• Otto
• Ralph
• Theodoric

Of these, the two that I found the most surprising — the ones I hadn’t really realized were as popular as they are until we started compiling such a huge corpus — are Louis and Theodoric. Louis, from its early Latinized form Hludowicus to its modern forms such as Louis, Lewis, Lodovico, Ludwig, and Luis, was an amazingly productive name, showing up in all cultures touched by the Carolingian empire, and, later, France (there being more medieval French kings named Louis than any other name). The popularity of Theodoric can be traced back to Theoderic the Great, ruler of the Ostrogoths at the fall of the western Roman empire. His deeds entered legend, and his name spread across Europe, spawing many variants and diminutives: In fact, more distinct spellings of this name are recorded than any other name we have catalogued so far (and that includes John!). In French, it became T(h)ierry; in Dutch, Derek and Dirk; in High German, Dietrich; in Low German, Diderik. The range of diminutive forms includes examples that a non-expert would scoff at as related: Who would think that Thidemann, Dytlin, Dietz, Tile, Tous, Tijdeke, and Thierrion are all nicknames of the same name?

All of these entries are already quite diverse in the citations they include, but will only become more so in the future. Mark your calendars, we are one week away from the publication of the next edition (our final one of 2015)!

Determination of header forms

Earlier this month, someone told us on twitter that he “would love to read more on procedure for name standardisation”. This post explores that topic.

When producing an onomastic dictionary restricted to a single language, it is relatively easy to pick the header names: If there is a standard modern form, use that, if not, use something that is consistent with standard modern forms. When dealing with data coming from a number of different cultures, this is not so easy, because the same name might have competing standard modern forms in different languages, e.g., Frederick in English, Friedrich in German, F(r)ederico in Italian, and a decision needs to be made between them.

In this situation, the choice is straightforward: The Dictionary is a work in English, even if it covers names from many languages and cultures. Thus, if a standard modern English form exists, that will be taken as the canonical name form (CNF) (aka, the header form). In cases where there are competing possibilities — e.g., Carla or Carol for the feminine form of Charles, or Casper and Jasper for the third magi’s name — the editorial team (comprised of American English speakers, British English speakers, and non-English speakers) decides the matter by vote.

In some cases, names exist modernly in languages other than English, which means that the option of taking the standard modern English form is not possible — some examples conclude Gottschalk, Ulrich, and Zdeslav. In such cases, where there is a clearly identifiable standarized form in some language that dominates other possible standardized forms, that is chosen for the CNF.

There is an exception to this, and that is how we treat dithematic German names. Many dithematic German names are still in use in Germany today, while many others have fallen out of use. It is possible to reconstruct expected modern forms of those which are no longer in use on the basis of those which are, but this results often in artificial forms which are not actually extent in any context. For example, Siegfried and Friedrich are standard modern forms of these two names, but the former appears in the Dictionary with the CNF Sigfrid. This keeps is alphabetized near its related names, Siggo, Sighard, Sigmund, Sigrad, Sigward, etc. Similar examples can be seen in looking at names beginning with Gothic þiuda, all found under Theod-.

Next we have names not fitting into any of the above categories, such as names deriving from Latin roots. For those which have not survived into a modern context, and which are found only in Latin-language documents, we use the standardized Latin form as the CNF.

Finally, there are names which are currently unidentified or otherwise problematic. For these, we take as the CNF the documentary form. There are few of those which are in the published version of the Dictionary; most of them are in the internal working version with the hopes that some day we will know more about them and can upgrade their CNF to one of the above.

99 Carolingian Charters

It sounds like the start of a bad drinking song: “99 Carolingian charters to transcribe, 99 charters to ‘scribe, write names down, share them around, 98 Carolingian charters to ‘scribe!”

But what it really is is what I completed today. In the midst of taking down enough citations for Karolus, Ott(h)o, Lotharius, and Fridericus that even I began to find them boring, there were also more fun aspects — the random and unexpected feminine name (one in a matronymic byname!); a pair of testators Gerardus albus and Gerardus niger; a man called Dodo (where’s the byname avis to go with it?); a fascinating example of a tri-thematic Germanic name (Gerbtratwine); and the question of what fonts will we be able to use on the Dictionary website in order to properly display the Gothic alphabet. In the course of working through the etymologies of the names in these charters, I’ve learned just how much I have to learn about the difference between Old High German and Old Saxon, and I’ve marveled and, really, just how few themes you need to have to create a complex and elaborate system of dithematic names. 20+ years doing onomastics, and there’s still so much to learn.