Announcing Edition 2020!

With about 40 minutes to spare, we did manage to get a new edition out in 2020!

2020 was a tough year for everyone, and things have been alternating really quiet and super productive here at DMNES central. If there’s one thing that was a pure, unalloyed joy and benefit of the upheaval of the pandemic, it was joining Mt. Holyoke’s internship scheme which facilitated the joining of four interns on our staff over summer, with one continuing on through the fall term as well. Much of what’s in this new edition — new names, new citations, updated info on Biblical and literary forms — is due to their hard work; and while some of their other work isn’t yet reflected in published editions, it’s laid the foundations for some exciting projects in the future.

So, on to some stats! The new edition has 2592 entries, with 77,248 citations distributed across those entries. (The entry with the most citations remains John, 4533 citations! That’s nearly 6% of all citations in the Dictionary in that single entry.) (Hah, as I was writing this up, our technical guru asked whether the numbers for Mary were comparable. I laughed, and said “no way, that name was never as popular, and he wanted to know the details. So: we have 832 citations for Mary, accounting for 1% of our data. Compare this to three other popular feminine names — Katherine, with 775 citations; Elizabeth, with 1159; and Margaret, with 1281 citations.)

This edition has a total of 931 distinct feminine names, 1658 masculine names, and 3 where the gender is uncertain. Of these, 44 of the feminine entries are new to this edition:

Women’s names
Agtrude
Albina
Ansilde
Aurofina
Baltrude
Bellabona
Benenata
Berna
Bernswith
Bernwara
Bertlinde
Desideria
Dominilde
Durande
Dutberta
Ermenalda
Fortuna
Gendrada
Godberg
Grimberg
Gundberg
Heilsinde
Lautrude
Lea
Lefhild
Liutwarde
Lodberta
Madalgarde
Maga
Maira
Meinfrida
Merberta
Novella
Odelrada
Oteria
Othilde
Percipia
Polemia
Radwise
Rolande
Sighilde
Warntrude
Wendelbalda
Zenobia

And there’s 98 new masculine names in this edition:

Men’s names
Adald
Adebert
Adegrim
Aitfrid
Aldebert
Amaro
Andger
Arner
Arno
Austrulf
Bago
Baldrad
Baldwald
Benenat
Benno
Bernulf
Bertbert
Bertmar
Bertram-Robert
Bertrick
Bodo
Bonald
Charles-Emmanuel
Cuthred
Dadmar
Daghard
Dodbert
Dominic-Amicus
Drutrich
Eckbald
Erchambert
Ermenald
Ermo
Everald
Folobert
Fortune
Fredebald
Gardulf
Gardwin
Gelbald
Gerhard
Gislold
Gordian
Hartnich
Helmger
Hemlwich
Hemlwin
Herger
Hildegrim
Hundolf
Hungrim
Isenbald
Isenbern
Isengrim
John-Andrew
John-Angel
John-Charles
John-Peter
Lantgrim
Liberat
Liebizo
Liutgard
Liutrad
Lodbald
Lodwin
Madaler
Madalrich
Marcrad
Marcrich
Merard
Merbod
Nantwin
Norwin
Noto
Odelrad
Otbald
Otgisl
Otrad
Peter-Andrew
Polydorus
Radger
Reinrich
Richbert
Richbod
Richsind
Rother
Sigwald
Sinbald
Sinbert
Theodeger
Waldemar
Waldemund
Wendelbald
Wilbald
Wildrad
Wineger
Witbert
Witrich

May your 2021 be filled with wonderful names! (Like Bertbert. Bertbert is such a great name.)

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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: Uliana

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 an especially interesting one because of the complicated context in which it is found. We have recently been working through a collection of notarial documents relating to enslaved pepole in Florence from the early 1360s on. The documents are fascinating for the wealth of data that they provide, not only on Florentine slave-owner names and the names of the people that they enslaved, but also the cultural and geographical origins of the enslaved people, their ages, and their physical characteristics. Reading through the records is sobering business: It is hard not to feel the weight of the unhappy story behind each entry. Most of the enslaved people are women; many of them are still children.

Most of the people were renamed after they were enslaved, with the documents often saying that someone was so named “in lingua latina”; a handful include the name the person was previously known by, “in lingua sua” or “in lingua tartare” (most frequently). Both data sets provide interesting material: On the side of the new names, certain classic Italian names are vastly over represented — probably 1/3 to 1/2 of the enslaved women were renamed some variant of Caterina or Margarita — both popular names in Italy in the 14th century, but not that popular. And on the side of the people’s original names, we get intriguing glimpses as to how names in Greek, Slavic, and Turkic languages were rendered into Latin. (For instance, the two Greek women who were named Cali or Chali in their original language may have in fact been named from καλή, the Greek word for ‘beautiful’).

What’s also interesting is that the pool of “Latin” names that were given to the enslaved people is not merely a subset of the names born by Florentines. Today’s mystery name is one that was the “new” name of two enslaved women (one of Tartar origin, the other not specified), and which we have not otherwise seen in Italy: Uliana.

Is it a form of Juliana/Iuliana? Is it a variant of Eliana (which itself may be a form of Juliana, or possibly a form of Ellen)? Is it distinct from either of these? We don’t know. We hope you might have some thoughts. Please share in the comments!

And if you are interested in knowing more about the enslaved people in 14th-century Florence, we are tweeting the names from the records on the anniversaries, at @FlorentineSlave.

Kings, Queens, and Bible Figures…or Not

It’s very easy for people with a dabbling interest in modern baby names to look at recent trends in Anglo-American naming practices (e.g., in the last century or so), compare them with what they know of modern-but-not-so-recent trends (e.g., in the 19th C or so), often taken from their own genealogical history, and then make sweeping pronouncements about “how people chose names for their children” or “what names people could name their children” before modern times. Sometimes these claims are influenced by data going even further back; everyone who knows a bit about names knows about Puritanisms like “Fly-Fornication” and “Bestiality” (oops, wait, that one’s a Pratchettism, not a Puritanism).

But it’s a mistake to think that because things changed between the 19th and the later 20th C, that everything before the 19th C was the same. Or even that because things changed in the 16th C, everything from the 16th to the 19th C was the same, and that everything before the 16th C was the same.

Today I came across someone claiming that in historical England, the only options were to name kids after kings, queens, and Bible figures. While it’s certainly true that some popular names were also the names of kings and queens (but there, the other of influence probably goes the other way: Kings and queens were given the names they were because they were common/popular, not that those names became common/popular because they were born by a king or queen) and that some popular names were also the names of important Biblical figures, this claim is problematic in a number of ways.

The first is that it overlooks a substantially-sized group of names that were quite common throughout English history: Names of non-Biblical saints, like Agnes, Margaret, Ursula, Katherine, and Cecilia, which were a particularly generative source of names for women. But even if we include that under “Bible names” (interpreting that to broadly cover “religious” names in general, rather than strictly to narrowly cover only names found in the bible), there are still numerous names — some enormously popular — that do not fit any of these categories.

Some years ago, now, we did two posts on the “most popular” women’s names and men’s names; now, these posts covered not only England, but all the names found on these lists were quite common in England. Let’s take a look at them.

Amongst the feminine names, Alice is a standout counterexample. While there were a few minor continental saints with this name, as well as an empress and a queen consort of Cyprus, these saints were not venerated in England and there’s no reason to think that the two royal women would have had any influence on the popularity of the name outside of their own lands. Yet, Alice was, and continues to be, enormously popular in England, with examples from as early as the second half of the 12th century. Another name on the list, Ellen, shows a similar trajectory: A handful of minor saints with local influence, none of whom were English, and one minor queen consort of a country other than England. And yet, we see this name in England from the early 12th C as well, it’s popularity influenced by the appearance of the name in medieval Arthurian romances (yes, medieval people named their children after literary characters, just as modern people do!).

Turning to the masculine names, Charles was never as popular in England as it was on the continent prior to the post-medieval English kings named Charles, but the name was used, despite there being no biblical, royal, or saintly connection. Another name that cannot be called biblical, royal, or saintly in England is Robert, a name whose popularity in England was driven by the Norman conquest. Sometimes, people just adopted names because they were a part of the changing cultures/fashions/fads of the times. Now, there was a minor (non-Biblical) 13th C English saint named Roger, and that might have contributed to an increase in the popularity of that name, at least in the region where the saint lived. But the name was already in use a century earlier, so the saint cannot have been the driving force (and, again, it’s more likely that a saint has a name because it was popular, rather than that the name was popular because it was given to a saint). A curious name is Walter: It is perhaps the most popular name in medieval Europe (not just medieval England) which was never the name of a saint or a ruler. This didn’t prevent it from often being in the top 5 most popular men’s names in 16th C English parish registers.

Now, these are just some of the most popular names, across all of Europe and a thousand-year-plus timespam. If we look more specifically just at England, and to some of the “not amazingly popular, but not totally unique” names, what we find there is that the number of non-religious, non-royal names proliferates. Such names include:

Feminine

• Adeline
• Amy
• Avice
• Basile
• Beatrice
• Blanche
• Celeste
• Clara
• Clarice
• Clemence
• Constance
• Diana
• Dulce
• Felicia
• Florence
• Guinevere
• Gunhild
• Hawise
• Honora
• Idony
• Lettice
• Loveday
• Mabel
• Meliora
• Milicent
• Nicole
• Olive
• Reinhilde
• Rose (entry to be published in the next edition)
• Sibyl

Masculine

• Alan
• Anschetil
• Archibald
• Bertram
• Brian
• Claude
• Cornelius
• Durand
• Emery
• Eude (entry still being written)
• Gavin
• Geoffrey
• Gervais
• Giles
• Godfrey
• Godwin
• Griffin (entry still being written)
• Guy
• Haimo
• Hugh
• Ingram
• Ivo
• Lambert
• Lancelot
• Leonard
• Miles or Milo
• Morgan
• Nigel (entry still being written)
• Norman
• Oliver
• Percival
• Ralph
• Roland
• Siger
• Theobald
• Theodoric
• Thorkill
• Thorsten
• Tristan (entry still being written)
• Warin
• Winmar

If we moved on to names that are found rarely, we’d have an even larger swathe of names to pick from.

So, yes, certainly names of kings and queens and saints (saints more so than Bible figures more generally) were popular names in England; but they were by no means the only choice of names available to medieval English people.

Names of Twins: 16th C Warwickshire

One thing that’s really fun about baptismal registers is seeing the incidence of twins being baptised, and what their names are. (A friend once did a study of a number of Welsh registers, and found that male twins were disproportionately baptised Thomas, which is an interesting comment on the transparency of the meaning to ordinary people at that time.) Because readers of this blog are likely to also be iterested in what twinsets are being named, we thought we’d do a short post on the names of twins found in the Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, parish register.

Between 1558 and 1600, 26 pairs of twins were baptised: 7 were both girls, 7 were both boys, and 12 were mixed. The pairs were named:

Girl 1	Girl 2	Boy 1	Boy 2	Year
Ales		John		1573
Alicia	Margeria			1565
Anna		Richardus		1561
Anna		Thomas		1561
Anne	Ales			1582/3
Anne		ffrancis		1584/3
		Christopher	Thomas	1579
ffrancis	Jone			1573
		ffrancis	John	1576
Elizabeth	Margret			1578
Isabell	Mary			1575/6
Jana		ffranciscus		1563
		Johannes	Richardus	1594/5
		Johannes	Robertus	1561
		Johannes	Thomas	1564
Jone		John		1589
Jone	Mary			1584/5
Judith		Hamnet		1584/5
Katerina		Johannes		1566
Katherine		William		1585
Katherine		Anthony		1575
Margareta	Maria			1568
Margret		Thomas		1574
Maria		Henricus		1591
		Peter	Thomas	1577
		Richardus	Thomas	1595

Those who know their literary history will spot a famous pair of twins in the list…

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.

Typical women’s names in early 14th C England

We’re currently working records from manorial court cases in England between 1250 and 1550 (namely, this source), and are now in the 1320s and 1330s.

One of the things that I love about court cases is how ordinary the names are; these are ordinary people, living ordinary lives. They are not royalty, they are not clerics, they are nothing that would mark their names out as unusual. So what were the typical women’s names in England at this time? Here are the ones we’ve come across so far (all in their Latin nominative forms; the actual vernacular form may have been quite different):

Margareta and Margeria, Johanna, Cecilia, Amicia, Alicia, Malota, Milisanta, Agnes, Juliana, Matilldis and Matilda, Dyonisia and Dionisia, Isabella, Emma, Athelina, Beatrice, and Katerina.

Aren’t they lovely?

How do you get Peggy from Margaret?

We recently answered a few questions about how certain nicknames/name forms came to be associated with their full forms over on FB. These comments seemed to generate enough interest that we figured we’d expand on them here in a couple of posts.

First up is a question that has probably puzzled a lot of English speakers at some point or another — just how did Peggy come to be a nickname of Margaret? Or Dick from Richard, Bob from Robert, Ted and Ned from Edward, etc.? In this post we’ll focus on Peggy and Margaret, but the same pattern of development happened for all these names. (We’ll make use of the terminology for nicknames that we introduced here).

So, how does Margaret become Peggy?

Margaret is the radiconym; take it and cut the name down to the first syllable, and you get Marg. In certain dialects, that r is going to be very lightly pronounced, giving us Mag. Magge (pronounced with two syllables) can be found in England as early as 1200, and not much later after that, you can find that hypocoristic form augmented with a diminutive suffix: Magota 1208 (this is a Latin form and would’ve been Magot in the vernacular). (We’ll give you three guesses as to why this name is no longer popular today….). By the end of the century, there are examples of the -a- shifting to -e-, e.g., Megge 1254, 1275, 1279, etc. You can also see it in Megota 1309 (also Latinized).

So that gets us Meg. From there, Peg is straightforward: It’s a rhyme.

The shift from something like Magge, Megge, or Pegge to Maggie, Meggie, or Peggy comes in the 16th C with the Great Vowel Shift — what used to be an unstressed schwa sound shifts to \ee\. And then eventually the spelling caught up, but that happened late enough that we don’t have any specific data. (Yet.)

References

Reaney & Wilson, s.nn. Dick, Dicken, Dicketts, Madge, Maggot.

Withycombe, s.nn. Edward, Margaret, Robert.

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: May

• May 1: Mathilda of Scotland died in 1118.
• May 2: Anne Boleyn was arrested for treason in 1536.
• May 3: Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, was born in 1415.
• May 4: John Wyclif and Jan Hus are condemned as heretics at the Council of Constance in 1415.
• May 5: Gerberga of Saxony died in 968/9 or 984.
• May 6: Dieric Bouts, Dutch painter, died in 1475.
• May 7: Remigius de Fécamp died in 1059.
• May 8: Pope Saint Benedict II died in 685.
• May 9: Hernando de Alarcón set sail for the Gulf of California in 1540.
• May 10: Emperor Claudius Gothicus was born in 210.
• May 11: Anne of Bohemia, queen consort of England, was born in 1366.
• May 12: Berengaria of Navarre was crowned queen of England in 1191.
• May 13: Julian of Norwich experienced her mystical visions in 1373.
• May 14: Simon de Montfort became de facto ruler of England in 1264.
• May 15: Mary Queen of Scots married her third husband, James, Earl of Bothwell, in 1567.
• May 16: Baldwin I was crowned Latin emperor of Constantinople in 1204.
• May 17: Anne of Denmark was crowned queen of Scotland in 1590.
• May 18: Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II of England in 1152.
• May 19: Saint Alcuin of York died in 804.
• May 20: Abraham Ortelius issued the first modern atlas in 1570.
• May 21: Albrecht Dürer was born in 1471.
• May 22: Saint Rita of Cascia died in 1457.
• May 23: Girolamo Savonarola was burned to death in 1498.
• May 24: Magnus Ladulås was crowned king of Sweden in 1276.
• May 25: Pope Boniface IV died in 615.
• May 26: Saint Augustine of Canterbury died in 604.
• May 27: Ludovico Sforza died in 1508.
• May 28: Caterina Sforza died in 1509.
• May 29: Philip VI was crowned king of France in 1328.
• May 30: Jerome of Prague was burned for heresy in 1416.
• May 31: Manuel I of Portugal was born in 1469.