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: July

• July 1: Feast day of Saint Aaron.
• July 2: Elizabeth Tudor was born in 1492.
• July 3: Hugh Capet was crowned king of the Franks in 987.
• July 4: Saint Ulrich of Augsburg died in 974.
• July 5: Joan of the Tower, queen consort of Scotland, was born in 1321.
• July 6: Richard the Lion-Heart ascended the throne of England in 1189.
• July 7: Madeleine of Valois died in 1537.
• July 8: Saint Grimbald died in 903.
• July 9: Dorothea of Saxe-Lauenburg was born in 1511.
• July 10: Emperor Hadrian died in 138.
• July 11: Martin Frobisher sights Greenland in 1576.
• July 12: Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle is printed in 1493.
• July 13: Alexander III is crowned king of the Scots.
• July 14: Louis VIII became king of France in 1223.
• July 15: Saint Bonaventure died in 1274.
• July 16: Saint Clare of Assisi was born in 1194.
• July 17: Count Baldwin VI of Flanders died in 1070.
• July 18: Godfrey de Bouillon, crusader knight, died in 1100.
• July 19: Philipa of Lancaster died in 1415.
• July 20: Claude, queen of France, died in 1524.
• July 21: Feast day of Saint Victor of Marseilles.
• July 22: William Wallace is defeated at the Battle of Falkirk.
• July 23: Saint Bridget of Sweden died in 1373.
• July 24: Mathilda of Tuscany died in 1115.
• July 25: Casimir I the Restorer was born in 1016.
• July 26: Pope Celestine died in 432.
• July 27: Conrad II of Italy died in 1101.
• July 28: Rodrigo de Bastedas, conquistador and explorer, died in 1527.
• July 29: Olaf II of Norway died in 1030.
• July 30: Italian painter Giorgio Vasari was born in 1511.
• July 31: Ignatius of Loyola died in 1556.

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.