medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Jan 20, 2008, at 11:37 AM, Anthony John Lappin wrote:
> I would be grateful to know if anyone has an idea of how commonly
> names with the form "X [christian name] of [town/village] Y" are found
> when documents or other references are already being signed/written in
> town Y, or those signing or being referred to are already explicitly
> from town Y. I'm particularly interested in twelfth and
> thirteenth-century clerics.
The conventional wisdom among the name researchers I know of is that
names like "Thomas of Coventry" were much more common when the people
likely to encounter the person (or his name, as for instance in a
letter or legal register) were NOT in Coventry. Remember, we are
definitely talking about an era (12th-13th century) before fixed,
inherited surnames -- and when a fairly wide variety of bynames were
in use, several different ones might be used by the same person in
different circumstances. Customers might know "Joan the Baxter",
neighbors might know "Joan [name of farm]" and it would be the same
person.
There were undoubtedly several dozen Thomases living in Coventry; at
home they were likely known as Thomas John's-son, Thomas the Black,
Thomas the Clerk, and so forth. Any one of them might, when being
referred to in Derby or Shrewsbury or Norwich, be known there as
"Thomas of Coventry" if that was the most salient thing about him in
the speaker's mind.
Onomastics is a big field, and how letters were signed (or their
writers identified in other ways) will vary quite a bit with time and
place, as I imagine you know. There are many times and cultures where
locative bynames (such as [Name] of [place]) were quite rare, such as
the Gaelic-speaking areas in general. In others, they were not
uncommon, but if I can over-generalize wildly, I'd guess that it
would be rare to see them as the predominant form -- if only because,
as someone mentioned earlier, there were very likely an awful lot of
people named John in the same village.
I would actually suggest you might do well to ask this question over
on the [MEDIEV-L] mailing list <http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/mediev-l/
mediev-l.html>, as I know there are onomasticists on that list who
don't necessarily read this one.
(If that doesn't work, or if you have certain times and places in
mind and are interested in the letter-signing question specifically,
ask me off-line and I may have a contact or two that could help.)
____________________________________________________________
O Chris Laning <[log in to unmask]> - Davis, California
+ http://paternoster-row.org - http://paternosters.blogspot.com
____________________________________________________________
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