medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Some comments on Graham Jones' comments, written quickly before I lose my e-mail client for most of the day. I hope others will join in.
On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 08:10:40 +0100 Graham Jones wrote:
>TASC faces this problem of what version of a saint's name to use in an international reference resource. The use of Latin versions is inappropriate for most saints of Eastern churches, saints with names in local vernaculars, and post-Reformation saints. It was agreed at our second colloquium that English was a reasonable, lingua franca compromise. That's OK for Mary, Michael, Peter. But somehow, substituting anything for 'Ranieri' doesn't seem quite right.
This is a problem common to such resources. My dilemma over Ranieri arose from a contribution to an encyclopedia whose style sheet prescribed the use of English-language equivalents for personal names in Italian or other "foreign" languages. Suppressing a desire to ask the editors if they really preferred "John Bocace" (an attested form, though one no longer current) to "Giovanni Boccaccio", I conformed -- even though this sort of linguistic transfer might be viewed by some as a form of cultural imperialism.
But as the example of Boccaccio shows, it's really more pragmatic to follow one's sense of current usage in English and to employ names in other languages when there is no widely accepted current English-language version (actually, "English-morphology" version: "Boccaccio" is now English as well as Italian). And, in fact, the encyclopedia in question seems to have wound up doing just that. For medieval Italy, where name-forms in Italian are of relatively late attestation, a good rule of thumb for earlier centuries (say, through C. 11) is to use Latin name-forms in the absence of widely accepted English-language equivalents.
>I nearly wrote 'anything non-Italian', which I suspect is a howler for the twelfth century,
Well, since one is using modern Italian rather than medieval or early modern name-forms, there's already an element of anachronism here. As a matter of convenience in a work of reference, that sort of anachronism seems quite acceptable for the twelfth century, when linguistic differentiation between Italian and Latin is either already well established or at least well under way and local forms of names from other tongues are a near-universal phenomenon.
>even disregarding the choice of the saints' parents of a Germanic (?Lombard) name.
The Italian onomastic repertory is full of these; it's a natural consequence of the italianisation of immigrant populations. In the case of Rainerius / Ranieri, it is possible that the name is originally Frankish rather than Lombard. The late 11th-century bishop Rangerius of Lucca, whose antecedents are totally unknown, is sometimes thought to be a Frenchman (whatever that means) because the only other well-known bearer of this name in medieval Italy, a twelfth-century bishop in Calabria (Reggio, I think) +did+ come from France. (Intervocalic -ng- is a common metathesis for -gn-, BTW; should we ignore that and call these bishops "Ragnar"?)
>Ranieri is one of the most important saints of Tuscany, so my own preference would be to follow local and regional usage.
You may run into difficulties when the regional usage is really non-standard. In the Italian south, for example, there are a number of places named San or Santo Mango. Would you represent the cult in question as that of Mango or of Magno or of Magnus?
Gee, Magnus and Ragnar. Perhaps there's an Old Norse stratum in Italy awaiting scholarly discovery.
Best,
John Dillon
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