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.

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Mystery Monday: Jeufine

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 feminine one from late 16th C Normandy (Protestant context, if that makes any difference). It’s one where we can easily come up with various guesses about its origins, but that’s all they are — guesses.

• Guess one: It is related to French jeu ‘game’ and fin(e) ‘fine, nice’ or fin(e) ‘final’. Problem: Very atypical type of construction (unless the phrase was some sort of phrase in common parlance at the time that we are not familiar with); fine is fem. but jeu is masculine (but perhaps this is simply because the name was borne by a woman!)
• Guess two: The editor misread an s for an f and the name is Jeusine; possibly then it is related to the English Josine we have from 1549. (An attempt to feminise Joseph? Or Josiah?)

Care to share any guesses of your own?

Mystery Monday: Josine/Josina

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 century England is an interesting place and period when it comes to names. On the one hand, the primary naming pool was shrinking at such a vast rate that by the early part of the next century, fully 1/4 of the men in some data sets were named John. On the other hand, we have discussed before about the rise of Protestant names during the second half of that century, with a wealth of new virtue names and newly introduced Biblical names. But this period was also a period of invention, of newly coined names that are in many cases wholly opaque as to origin — not unlike the late 20th and early 21st centuries in both England and America! Some of these names we may never be able to establish any definitive origin to. Today’s name may be one of them:

In this case we aren’t even sure of the right choice of header. The documented form of the name is Josina, but ordinarily this would indicate the importation of a Latin form into a vernacular context, and that we would expect to find a vernacular form like Josine earlier on. On the assumption that we can find other examples of this name before the end of the 16th C, we’ve taken Josine as our tentative header form. But if this name is a genuine new coinage, it may have been coined directly in the vernacular with the terminal -a. Is it a diminutive of Josia, used by a woman? Is it a form of Joseph? The only way to know would be to find more examples of the name in more contexts. Have you found any examples of this name? Please share!

Medieval roots of modern names: The US 2015 top 51-100 for boys

At this rate, we’re probably going to only make it through the top 100 before the month is out. One thing that has been interesting about each group of names that we’ve looked at is how consistent the relative popularities of different name types have been, with Biblical names being the most common amongst the boys’, and relatively unrepresented amongst the girls. We’ll see that trend continue as we move down to the top 51-100 of the boy’s names, and thus even if we don’t investigate any further, we would not be surprised to see this trend trickle even further down the list. But let’s see what else we can find!

As we noted, the Biblical again dominate this group, but this time we start to see the influence of non-English spellings on American names. Firs we have two variants of John: Evan (67), a medieval Welsh form, and Ian (76), modernly generally treated as a Scottish form but medievally actually found in the Low Countries, Germany, and Eastern Eruope. Then we have two Spanish forms: Jose (80) and Mateo (85) (this is, of course, also an Italian form!). Amongst the standard English forms of the names we have but two New Testament names — Thomas (no. 51) Nathaniel (97) — compared to a wide range of Old Testament names: Aaron (52); Eli (53); Jeremiah (55); Josiah (57); Jordan (60); Adam (73); Asher (83); Zachary (88); Ezra (92); and Elias (100).

Of these names, a few deserve extra note. First, neither Jeremiah nor Josiah are typical medieval spellings: before 1600, both were more commonly spelled with the Greek influenced form -ias. This is exactly where Elias (as opposed to Elijah) comes from, and if you check out the variants of Zachary, you’ll find -ias forms there as well. Second, we lack entries for Eli, Ezra, and Asher: This is a reflection of the fact that these names were rarely used by Christians until the 17th C, being more commonly used by Jews — and so far, our coverage has a distinct dearth of Jewish records. Third, it is debatable whether Jordan should be considered in this list. Certainly, most people associate the name with the Biblical river Jordan. And this association is ancient and honorable: The name was popular in the Middle Ages particularly amongst those who had been on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and brought back water from the Jordan River to baptise their children. However, it is unlikely that this was the original root of the name; instead, the root appears to be an Old German name Jordanes. (The complications surrounding the name are why we don’t yet have an entry for it, despite the fact that we have examples from England, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, from the 11th C to the 16th!)

We then have a slew of given names that were not originally given names, but surnames — and if we collect all four groups, locative, occupational, patronymic, and descriptive, together, they outnumber the Biblical names. The place names are almost all English in origin: Colton (59), Brayden (61), Lincoln (66), Easton (78), Brandon (82), and Bentley (93). The one exception is Xavier (90), an Old Spanish form of a Basque place name deriving from etxe berri ‘new house’ or ‘new home’. The occupationals are all medieval English: a Parker (72) maintained a park or game preserve; Chase (74) was a name for a hunter, someone who chases; a Cooper (77) made barrels while a Tyler (81) lay tiles and a Sawyer (94) sawed wood. A Ryder (98) is one who rides out, and this specific spelling is not modern, but can be found in the 16th C. In our patronymics group we have already seen a variant of Jaxson (84) in an earlier post. Hudson (65) is ‘son of Hudd‘ — a pet form of either Hugh or Richard. Nolan (71) could also be put under the “Irish” heading below: It derives from the Irish clan byname Ó Nualláin, which in turn derives from Irish nuall ‘noble, famous’. There are two descriptive: Cameron (56), from Irish camshron ‘bent nose’ and Blake (96), which has two equally plausible, and contradictory origins: It can be from both Old English blǣċ ‘pale, bright, shining’ and blæc ‘black, dark’. Finally we have Carson (89), a Scottish surname of uncertain origin. Early forms include Carsan, Acarson, and Corsan, and it may have been originally a place name.

The next biggest groups are the names of Greek and Latin origin. For the former, there is Nicholas (62), popular throughout Europe; Angel (64), concentrated in Italy and Iberia; Jason (86) and its nickname Jace (75), which we could also place in the Biblical names category above, and if we had any medieval examples of the name we probably would have — modernly, the Greek hero rather than the obscure New Testament character is the more likely root of the name; and Theodore (99), a rare name medievally and one easily confused with forms of Theodoric. In the second group, we have the imperial Adrian (58), especially popular in the Low Countries; lordly Dominic (68), also spread throughout Europe; saintly Austin (69), this form an English contraction of the larger Augustine; and Leo (91), which is equally derivable from the Latin and the Greek.

This leaves us with six names, half of which are Irish: Connor (54) is an English form of the Irish name Conchobhar, which was popular in Ireland from the 8th to the 16th C; Kevin (79) is an English form of the early Irish saint’s name Cáemgen used in the 6th and 7th C. The name was not otherwise used, until it was revived in the modern period, but the place name Caisleáin Caoimhghin was recorded in English in a variety of spellings throughout the Middle ages, including Castelkevyn in 1308 and 1547, Castle Kevin in 1590, Castlekevin in 1542, and Castrum Kevini in 1343; and Ayden (87) is a variant of Aiden, which we’ve discussed earlier in this series.

What is most surprising about this group of names is that we have but one name of German: Robert (63), which had held sway for centuries as one of the most popular names. We also have a name of Welsh that we discussed in detail a few months ago as part of our Arthurian names series: Gavin (70). Last in the group we have one name which is purely modern: Kayden (95). The most tenuous connection that we can make from this name to the Middle Ages is via the Scottish surname Cadenhead, originally the name of a place at the head of the Caldon or Cadon Water in Selkirkshire. But this is at best a retrospective connection.

Medieval roots of modern names: The US 2015 top 11-25 for boys

Having covered the top 10 in our previous two posts, we now go through the names in a bit quicker fashion. In this post we cover names 11-25 from the boy’s list, grouping them together according to origin.

Biblical: Elijah (no. 11) is almost unheard of in the Middle Ages in this form — instead, it was the form Elias, influenced by the Greek spelling of the name, that was extremely common, particularly in England and France, giving rise to the English vernacular Ellis. Daniel (no. 12) was used throughout Europe from a relatively early period, but it wasn’t until the 16th C that it became popular. The Old Testament is definitely the favored part of the Bible for this group of names, with four more drawn from there. David (no. 18) has enjoyed widespread popularity, showing up as the name of early Welsh and Anglo-Saxon saints and of two 14th C kings of Georgia (the country, not the state). The name was especially popular in Wales where it gave rise to a plethora of nicknames, of which Dio would be a fun alternative to re-introduce into modern use. Joseph (no. 21) is rather like Daniel: Found throughout Europe but never especially popular. Unlike Daniel, however, it didn’t enjoy a boost in use by the Puritans, likely for the same reasons that Mary was not especially preferred. Gabriel (no. 22) is a strange one; it shows up in France and Italy from the 14th C, but was almost unheard of before then, and it was not common in England at all until the 16th C. In contrast, Samuel (no. 23) was for the most part more popular in England then elsewhere.

Moving on to the New Testament, two of the gospel writers are featured: Matthew (no. 15) and Lucas (no. 16). The former was rare before the 12th C but afterwards became quite common all over Europe, and in a wide variety of forms. Lucas is the Latinized form of the name, but it was also found in the vernacular, being the spelling used in the Wycliffite translation of the Bible into English from 1395. Lucas was also the preferred Middle French spelling, and a handful of examples in Spanish and German are also known.

Irish: Aiden (no. 13) is an anglicized form of Old and Middle Irish Áedán/Early Modern Irish Aodhán, which is traditionally identified as a diminutive of the O/MIr áed ‘fire’. Áedán was a popular name in early Ireland, and the plethora of saints named this (including one who went as a missionary to northern England and founded the monastery of Lindisfarne, not far from where the DMNES headquarters are located!) has contributed to the revival of the name in the 20th C. We do not yet have any examples of the name in the Dictionary, but that is because of some of the unique problems that the main sources for Irish names — the Irish annals — present in our contexts. We’ve got a blog post brewing on that topic, as we may have figured out at least part of a solution recently.

Surnames: In this category we have three surnames, one originally deriving from a place name, one from a patronymic byname, and one from an occupation. While all of these names have medieval roots, none of them were used as given names in the Middle Ages. Logan (no. 14) derives from a number of places known by this name, the most important being Logan in East Ayrshire, Scotland. Jackson (no. 17) quite literally means ‘son of Jack’, with Jack being a diminutive of John found in England from the 13th C. The surname of occupation Carter (no. 24) derives from Latin carettarius, Old North French caretier, Middle English cart(e) (of Scandinavian origin) + -er, or Old French charetier, all meaning ‘charioteer, carter’, or the like. The byname arrived in England with the Normans and the Danes.

Miscellaneous: The three that don’t fit in any other category are an eclectic mix. First there is Oliver (no. 19). Many people have suggested is related to Latin oliva ‘olive’ but this hypothesis is not well supported. A more plausible alternative is that it is a gallicization of Scandinavian Olafr, which arrived in France with the Vikings. Indeed, the first examples we see are in France and England in the 12th C, about when you’d expect the Northman name pool to have become the Norman name pool. The name was also much less common in places that were not significantly influenced by the Vikings.

Next we have Jayden (no. 20), the first name in this list that has no identifiable medieval origins of any kind. The name came into use in the US in 1994, and its origins before that are murky.

Finally, Anthony (no. 25) is the only name on the list of Roman origin. It was the name of a Roman gens, and is itself possibly of Etruscan origin. One might expect that names of Roman inheritance to be most popular in Italy — and indeed we have a number of Italian examples — but the popularity of the 4th C Saint Anthony ensured that the name spread widely throughout Europe.

Protestant names: Old Testament influences on men’s names (part 2)

In this post we continue where we left off, with the next installment of Old Testament names and where they show clear influence of the rise of Protestantism in the second half of the 16th C.

Gabriel: The name of one of the archangels, this name was moderately common in France, Italy, and Iberia throughout most of the later Middle Ages, but was rare in England before the 16th C.

Gamaliel (entry available in the next edition): This could be considered an Old Testament name or a New Testament — a minor character by this name appears in each — but either way, this name typifies the pattern that we are investigating. It’s the name of a minor Biblical character, it was essentially unheard of before the end of the 16th C, and in the 16th and 17th C, we can find it used amongst both French and English Protestants.

Gideon: The judges were a popular source for names, and Gideon is another example of this. Our examples are spread across all three of our sources, from the 1560s on.

Hezekiah: The major and minor prophets were another popular source. Our single example of the name, Esechias, shows the typical medieval spelling of names which in modern English are often spelled with -iah (for example, as seen with medieval Elias as compared to modern Elijah) — we’ll see this quirk of spelling again below.

Isaac: The name of the son of the great Hebrew patriarch, Isaac shows up in the medieval mystery plays, so the name was not unheard of in England prior to the 16th C, and outside of England it can be found in the 12th and 13th C, but in the 16th C, it is especially associated with the Protestant contexts that we’ve been investigating.

Isaiah: The name of another prophet, perhaps one of the most important in the Old Testament, we find it in a variety of French spellings in the registers from Caen.

Israel: The name given to the Biblical patriarch Jacob, after he wrestled with God. Unlike the name Jacob itself (which was, throughout the Middle Ages and after, so popular that there is no plausible way we can appeal to it as evidence for our pattern! A similar story can be told of John, so we will be omitting both from consideration in the present context.), Israel was never so popular, but we have a handful of examples in English and Dutch at the end of the 16th C.

Job (entry available in next edition): Another eponymous character of one of the Old Testament books, Job’s story of perseverance in the face of adversity made it a popular choice after the Reformation for parents seeking meaningful names. However, prior to the 17th C, it still remained rare.

Jonas (entry available in next edition): Better known in modern English in the form Jonah, the medieval form Jonas reflects the Greek spelling of the name. While the name was used rarely in Germany and Switzerland in the 12th and 13th C, in the 16th C, our examples all come from Protestant contexts.

Jonathan (entry available in next edition): The name of the beloved friend of King David, Jonathan can be found in Dutch contexts in the 16th C.

Josaphat: The name of one of the kings of Judah, we have a single example from Caen in 1565.

Joseph: A curious name in that there is no clear time of context in which it was ever especially, or ever especially rare. It, unlike many of the other names that we’ve considered, was not especially taken up by the Protestants.

Joshua: This name is the same in origin as Jesus, but the two names were almost uniformly treated as distinct. The name was never popular, but the handful of instances that we have are all from Protestant contexts.

Josiah: Like Hezekiah above, the medieval spelling of Josiah was generally -ias rather than -iah, and we can see this spelling appearing in Dutch, French, and English.

That’s enough of the list for now, we’ll return to it again in our next post!

Nicknames in medieval Estonia

In our previous post, we surveyed the percentage of diminutive and hypocoristic forms in the Dictionary’s dataset sorted according to modern countries, and one stand-out surprise was Estonia: Over 40% of our citations are nicknames of some form! Why is it that diminutives and hypocoristics were so popular in medieval Estonia?

Well, we aren’t exactly in a position to answer the why, but we can look at the what — what are the types of nickname patterns that we see, do they differ between men and women, can we say anything interesting about these patterns vs. those in nearby countries? That’s what we will explore in this post.

First, the feminine names: Only two of the nicknames belong to women, and both come from a Middle Low German contexts. The first is, in the vocabulary we introduced, a hypocoristic, formed by taking a name and truncating it to make a pet form. The example is Barbar, from Barbara. This same diminutive also shows up in Latvia, again in MLG contexts. The second is a diminutive, formed by adding the Low German diminutive suffix -ke, to the root name Anne, to result in the form Anneke. As with Barbar, Anneke also shows up in Latvia at roughly the same time.

This leaves over 600 diminutive forms left, of which nearly 10% — 53 — are Hans, a German hypocoristic of Johannes, one of the standard Latin forms of John, and if we add variants such as Hannes, Han, Hanß, etc., the number rises significantly. From about the middle of the 12th C on, John quickly became far and away the most popular man’s name throughout Europe. In German dialects, Hans, Hanns, Hannes, etc., were often as much more popular than Johannes or Johan than these names were than the next most popular.

So, one answer to the ‘why’ is: Because Low German was a standard documentary language in late medieval Estonia, and the most popular masculine name in late medieval Low German contexts was a diminutive, so that is why there are so many diminutives in medieval Estonia. (This, however, doesn’t address the other why question, which is why the nickname forms were more common than full forms!)

Hans makes up just under 10% of the masculine nicknames; a large percentage of the remainder are covered by just a handful of other names: Cord, Kord, Kort, a Low German hypocoristic of Conrad; Hintze, Hennyng, Hennynck, Heine, from Henry; Cleys, Clauwes, Claues, Claes, Cleys, Clawes, and numerous other hypocoristics of Nicholas; Ludike and Ludeke, from Louis; and Wynyke, a diminutive of any of various names beginning with wini ‘friend’. Other less common names also give rise to hypocoristics, such as Bastian, from Sebastian; Brosius, from Ambrose; and Aßmuß from Erasmus.

So much for the ordinary, every day nicknames, your Estonian Tom, Dick, and Harry, if you will. Let’s explore some of the unusual ones!

• Nicknames of Constantine: Coest, Kosst.
• Nicknames of Habakukk: Habbo, Köke, Kock.
• Nickname of Hubert: Hoppe.
• Nicknames of Jacob: Jaeck, Jack, Jacho, Kowpy, koup.
• Nickname of Joachim: Jachi.
• Nicknames of Joseph: Jessa, Seppo.

One thing of note is that many of these unusual hypocoristics derive from Biblical names.

We’ll close by looking at one name which, across Europe, is one of the most prolific spawner of nicknames: Theodoric. In Estonia alone, the name rivals John in popularity, and we have seventeen different nickname forms — most of which are diminutives of hypocoristics: Tideke, Tideken, Tideman, Tidike, Tijdeke, Tijdeman, Tijdike, Tile, Tous, Tydedeynk, Tydek, Tydeke, Tydeken, Tydeman, Tydike, Tydiken, Tyman.

This will not be the last time we see Theodoric when exploring this month’s topic!