[SCA-AS] [Fwd: TMR 08.01.12 Postles and Rosenthal, Studies on the Personal Name (Sindelar)]

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Subject: TMR 08.01.12 Postles and Rosenthal, Studies on the Personal Name
(Sindelar)
From:    "The Medieval Review" <tmrl at indiana.edu>
Date:    Thu, January 17, 2008 10:07 am
To:      tmr-l at indiana.edu
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Postles, Dave and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds. Studies on the Personal
Name in Later Medieval England and Wales. Kalamazoo: Medieval
Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2006. Pp. 391.
$60.00. ISBN: 978-1-58044-025-8.

    Reviewed by Arlene Sindelar
         The University of British Columbia
         arlene.sindelar at ubc.ca

Joel Rosenthal's introductory essay frames this collection of articles
by pointing out that the act and process of naming, so important in
our own personal lives, has largely been taken for granted by
historians. He and his co-editor, David Postles, have shown that is no
longer the case by gathering together a collection of fourteen
articles--eight of them published previously--that decipher what
personal names and naming reveal about the cultures and societies of
the medieval past in England and Wales. The papers in this collection
present an overview of past research, and recent specialized case
studies, all raising questions for further research. It is
particularly valuable to have such significant groundbreaking articles
as Cecily Clark's 1978 Speculum article "Women's Names in Post-
Conquest England: Observation and Speculations," included with the
publications of other historians who have relied and built on her
work.

Part I introduces the concerns of onomastics, the study of names and
naming, with articles by Rosenthal, his co-editor David Postles, and
Clark. The editors have structured the rest of articles in the volume
according to their approach to kinds of populations rather than
chronologically, geographically, or even topically. Yet as Rosenthal's
introduction confesses, most articles cross thematic boundaries and
employ various approaches to their data, making any arrangement quite
arbitrary. He identifies three chief lines of analytical inquiry: the
intimate relationships of family household, friends, kin, and patrons;
the broader cultural influences of ethnicity, class structure, and
language; and the development of a very limited stock of popular
names, indicating "an anti-individualized way of staking a claim to
one's place in the world" (4).

Cecily Clark's 1987 article, "English Personal Names ca. 650-1300:
Some Prosopographical Bearings," provides the historical
prosopographer with technical knowledge necessary to profit from the
conclusions of anthroponymy, the study of personal names, to more
precisely interpret names of their populations under study. Tracing
the changing trends in naming conventions and patterns from the Old to
Middle English periods, she explains how personal and family names
both reveal and obscure the bearer's ethnic and social origins in the
tangle of Old English, Continental Germanic, Scandinavian, pre- or
post-Conquest, or Christian influences. As much as the historical
community owes the compilers of the reference books of names gleaned
from the broad array of primary sources, Clark urges a reappraisal of
their interpretations and resultant etymologies. Prosopographers and
genealogists, she asserts, should work together with the
anthroponymist to develop a more informed understanding of the
historical and cultural meaning of English names.

The third introductory article, "Identity and Identification: Some
Recent Research into the English Medieval 'Forename,'" by David
Postles, problematizes the question of identity through a name
bestowed upon a person by others, not as an expression of self-hood.
Postles articulates the book's theme throughout the various articles
as working out the significance of naming as it was negotiated and
contested among various social and cultural influences. He presents
the several distinct twelfth-century changes bringing new influences
to the social coding of names and the process of naming. But whatever
the factors affecting name choice, by the late Middle Ages the pool of
the most popular names for both sexes contracted to fewer than ten and
remained so into the early modern period. Postles concludes with a
discussion of nicknames, bynames, and surnames--an area of the field
that he has made peculiarly his own--that likely did describe some
aspect of self and provided individual identity attached to the
handful of common nomina that dominated the population from the
thirteenth century on. At the end of Postles' sweeping discussion is
a very useful bibliography that includes most of the works of
scholarship referenced throughout the volume.

The articles in Part II, Social Groups, deal with issues relating to
the impact of defined social communities on the naming process and
what names reveal about those units. Clark's second article, "Women's
Names in Post-Conquest England: Observation and Speculations," deals
with the role of marriage in cultural identification and transmission
in Anglo-Norman England. Her analysis of female names in early
charters support the explicit statements by chroniclers that
intermarriages between Norman lords and English women were frequent
and consequently blurred distinctions between free-born English and
the Normans. Building on the premise that wives, nurses, and other
women in the household served as the primary instruments of cultural
transmission, Clark constructs a picture of the late eleventh-century
English military elite household in which boys bore solid Norman
names, daughters more frequently carried English ones, and all
children were raised learning both maternal and paternal tongues. By
the end of the twelfth century, Insular English names were
disappearing in all classes within the time frame of two to three
generations, replaced by Continental names made popular by the
Normans. Clark addresses possible reasons for this cultural shift, but
concludes that by 1200 the fashion for selecting fashionable French
Christian names for girls lagged significantly behind the trend for
boys, and represents enduring Anglo-Saxon cultural influence in the
homes of both the elite and the lowly.

Virginia Davis, in "The Popularity of Late Medieval Personal Names as
Reflected in English Ordination Lists, 1350-1540," focuses on the
narrowing of the range of male forenames in the English population.
Seeking to pinpoint the precise timing of this development, she relies
on the English Ordination lists for a database of 8000 names to chart
the broad trends of their rising and falling popularity. Throughout
the entire period the name of John is dominating in its popularity;
William, Thomas, Richard, and Robert consistently round out the top
five names. These five names accounted for about 75% of all given
names on the lists. Her appendix analyzes the fortunes of the rest of
the names that appear among the top twenty choices. It is in those
names that the most significant shifts occur over the period,
appearing to reflect changing political, social, and religious
sentiments in the population. For example, good old Norman names
decrease significantly, and the appearance of two new names in the
fifteenth century, Christopher and George, denotes the religious
influence of two of the most influential devotional cults of the late
Middle Ages: the cult of the Holy Name and the cult of St. George.

The next three articles all deal with the importance of spiritual
kinship and godparents in the naming process in England and each
relies upon the Proofs of Age records contained in the Inquisitions
Post Mortem (IPM) to show that not only did godparents name children
at Baptism, but that the chief same sex godparents usually bestowed
their own name upon them. Michael Bennett's lengthy article,
"Spiritual Kinship and the Baptismal Name in Traditional European
Society," begins by exploring the history of spiritual kinship and its
impact on naming practices from the fifth to the eighteenth century.
He traces the rise of spiritual kinship as an impediment to marriage
in Merovingian Gaul and how compaternitas appeared at times to
have created a more emotional bond than blood. Spiritual kinship in
medieval Europe, Bennett declares, increasingly transcended the social
boundaries of age, lineage, rank, and race and "served as the warp and
weft of the social fabric" (125). Men of rank and wealth in post-
conquest England apparently acted as godfather to many more children
than the average person, contributing to the phenomenon of a limited
name pool becoming dominant in the population. A study of spiritual
kinship, Bennett suggests, could reveal the spheres of local influence
and the hitherto invisible connections between individuals and
families in English communities.

Philip Niles' "Baptism and the Naming of Children in Late Medieval
England" further investigates the role of godparents in naming
children, and challenges the use of forenames by historians as
evidence to establish a suspected family relationship. He argues that
Christian names cannot be relied upon to indicate family relationship,
since godparents, not the parents, named the children, a custom still
visible in sixteenth-century parish registers. The power that
godparents exercised in naming the child was quite striking, and
although there is indication that they often followed the expectations
of the parents, godparents did sometimes act quite independently. The
importance of the intimate relationship created at baptism indicated
by the English word gossibs implies a social intimacy that
leads Niles to support Lawrence Stone's conclusion that the medieval
family was indeed more porous and less nuclear than many historians,
such as Alan MacFarlane, are willing to admit.

In "Social Connections between Parents and Godparents in Late Medieval
Yorkshire," Louis Haas employs Yorkshire records from the IPM in
conjunction with other administrative records for an intensive
examination of the web of relationships between parents, heir, and
godparents.  He discovers that 62% of these tenants-in-chief chose
godparents lower in status, while only 8% selected godparents who were
higher in status, contrary to the conclusions of other historians,
including Bennett and anthropologist Stephen Gudeman, who worked with
different populations. Few of the parents had any discernible feudal
relationship of any kind with the heirs' godparents. Haas concludes
that spiritual kinship was intentionally used to extend rather than
intensify kinship networks in Yorkshire, that the frequent choice of
godparents of lesser status and of the clergy intentionally reduced
the danger of future marital impediments, and that parents often
manipulated the naming process by selecting godparents who shared
their own names.

The following study by Peter Franklin, "Normans, Saints, and Politics:
Forename Choice among Fourteenth-Century Gloucestershire Peasants,"
turns to the lowly peasants on the well-documented estate of
Thornbury. He establishes that Norman names and twelfth-century
imported names from the continent largely replaced Anglo-Saxon male
and female names in the peasantry by the first half of the fourteenth
century.  Whereas the 1322 Extent of Thornbury Manor and the 1327
Subsidy Roll of Gloucester serve as good sources for the analysis of
male given names, it is only the records of the merchet payment in the
contemporary Thornbury manorial court rolls that provide a list of
peasant female names substantial enough for analysis. His study
suggests that peasants' naming choices may have reflected their
political and religious views through their selection of royal and
saints' names, but that by this period, any tendency they had of
naming their children after their own lords (as suggested by Clark in
her second article) had disappeared.

The three articles grouped in Part III pertain to using names and
naming as a method of charting social and political change within a
geographic region or specific populations. "Some Aspects of Regional
Variation in Early Middle English Personal Nomenclature," by John
Insley, considers the regional differences in the survival of
Scandinavian culture and the impact of Norman or Breton immigration.
Examining the names in Anglo-Saxon writs, cartularies, and Domesday
Book, as well as the name lists compiled in the reference books, he
emphasizes two major directions for future research. Although there
have been excellent regional studies published, a systematic framework
that defines geographic onomastic zones in medieval England has not
yet been constructed. A broad timeframe is necessary to observe the
dynamic changes in naming and these developments must be meticulously
analyzed in their historical context. Secondly, all types of sources
must be used so that every social group is adequately represented.

Heather Jones urges historians to learn to "think like a statistician"
(212),in her project "Comparing Historic Name Communities in Wales:
Some Approaches and Considerations." She establishes a more rigorous
statistical method of analysis to draw conclusions and to make
comparisons between unequal populations with greater confidence. With
painstakingly explanation, she determines the appropriate sizes of
populations necessary for comparison, and whether a record that
produces a pool of names containing duplicates is as statistically
useful as a list without them. Her resolution of this latter issue
makes unedited court records as valuable as tax records in
establishing naming practice. The article concludes that the
"distribution of name popularity remains remarkably consistent" across
all the populations she studied, and although foreign names generally
appear primarily near English settlements, this changes over time and
the difference was no longer distinctive (244). For those historians
confused by her technical discussion of statistical method, she
cautions that evidence from small populations or anecdotal evidence,
unsubjected to statistical rigor, limits the types and validity of
conclusions that can be drawn from the evidence.

Dave Postles' second original contribution to this collection,
"Resistant, Diffused, or Peripheral? Northern Personal Names to ca.
1250," compares Cecily Clark's conclusions concerning women's names in
the post-conquest era to name data from the North of England. Using
manorial surveys, plea rolls, and cartularies, he discovers that there
was little cultural homogeneity across the northern counties as
various cultural traditions of naming competed with Norman influence
and coexisted for most of the twelfth century. Among the peasantry,
Insular names persisted even longer, into the next century.
Interpreting these results, Postles suggests that peasant naming
practices may have served as a tactic of cultural resistance.

Part IV particularly focuses on what the effect of the Norman Conquest
on naming patterns reveals about its social and cultural impact.  In
"The Domesday Jurors," C.P. Lewis probes whether Norman lordship
replaced Anglo-Saxon landownership as completely as the Domesday Book
appears to indicate. Using lists of the recorded Domesday jurors in
Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire that comprise both Saxon and Norman
landholders, he argue that the survey did not include all freeholders
in 1086 England, namely those at the second level of tenancy below the
tenants-in-chief as well as those who held only part of a manor. He
identifies a few of the English and French jurors as landholders
listed in the survey, and once he includes the rest of the jurors the
number of English landowners quadruples, uncovering at the county
level a largely English society.

"Names and Ethnicity in Anglo-Norman England," by Stephanie Mooers
Christelow, analyzes forenames, surnames, and bynames to highlight
"the shifting expressions of ethnicity," as the Norman French
conquerors "were well on their way to becoming English" by the middle
of the twelfth century (371). Anglo-Saxon surnames usually designated
occupation, rank, or place of residence rather than family lineage or
kinship as they did in France. The Norman conquest, however,
encouraged some native English to emphasize their ancestry in adoption
of surnames even as they began selecting French forenames for their
children, effectively identifying themselves and being identified by
others as Norman. By 1150, descendents of William the Conqueror's
continental followers had abandoned their surnames indicating their
French origins in favor of English or ambiguous ones.

Taken together these studies reveal a broad array of contributions to
our understanding of the complexities of society, identity, and
relationships in England and Wales, and show what it is possible to
achieve when the tools of the onomastic, statistician, and
prosopographer are used to mine the resources of names and their
cultural significance. The name data in article appendices and the
volume index itself supply ready access to the wealth of insight,
guidance, and information that this useful compilation of articles
contains for the historian of political, social, and cultural change.

-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net