A Note on Names

Written by Patrick DeBrosse

“Why, how call you these grunting brutes running about on their four legs?” demanded Wamba.

“Swine, fool, swine,” said the herd, “every fool knows that.”

“And swine is good Saxon,” said the Jester; “but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?”

“Pork,” answered the swine-herd.

“I am very glad every fool knows that too,” said Wamba, “and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what do'st thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?”

“It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool’s pate.”

“Nay, I can tell you more,” said Wamba, in the same tone; “there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calve, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.”

- Ivanhoe; A Romance, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Edinburgh: 1820), pp. 16-17.

For the millions of people who watched The Last Kingdom on streaming (or any of the many other Viking-related series), the show required getting used to some pretty weird names. There’s Uhtred, Aelswith, Sihtric, Aethelflaed, and dozens more. But by far the weirdest name in the main cast - and the one that almost no audience members found strange - is “Edward.” King Edward (unlike several other characters in the show) was a real person. But the man never actually called himself “Edward.” No, the real-life version tended to go by “Eadvveard,” at least in writing. “Edward” is just our modern name for him. The same goes for pretty much any other “normal” name audiences run into when they watch something or read something about the Middle Ages. William the Conqueror did not actually call himself “William.” St. Francis did not call himself “Francis.” Joan of Arc did not call herself “Joan.” 

Most people don’t realize how often we medieval historians translate the names of the past into modern English. Even those of us doing the translating don’t usually think too hard about it. A historian reading a Latin manuscript turns a “Iacobus” into a “James” without so much as a second thought. But you can translate names in many different ways. To stick with Iacobus, I recommend you take a second to go to Wikipedia and view the page for St James the Great (an apostle of Christ). Now look at the versions of his page in different languages. You will find that around the world he becomes Jacques (French), Jakobus (German), Santiago (Spanish), Giacomo (Italian), Séamus (Irish), and so on and so on. So if you’re an English-speaking historian reading about a Frenchman whose Latin name is Iacobus, do you call him the English James or the French Jacques? We sometimes default to the modern language of the region we study, but in the Middle Ages the boundaries of language groups and countries shifted constantly (and did not resemble those that exist today). What do you do with a French-speaker who lived in what is now Ireland? An Italian who grew up in Syria?

Most of us medieval historians[1] don’t actually have a consistent rule. We follow convention. We translate the names by imitating what other scholars writing on the same subject have done before us. Some thoughtful scholars add a “Note on Names” to the beginning of their books to beg their readers’ pardon for inconsistencies in convention.[2] The problem is that inconsistent convention usually leads to certain groups getting Anglicized, and others remaining, well, foreign. French people (at least before the Hundred Years War) usually get Anglicized: “Peter” the Venerable and “Philip” Augustus, not “Pierre” and “Philippe.” Medieval Italians, however, usually receive modern Italian names: “Enrico” Dandolo and “Francesco” Petrarch, not “Henry” and “Francis.” Unless they’re particularly famous. If they’re famous enough, we allow them to pass as English-sounding people. Hence St. “Francis” and “Christopher” Columbus, not “Francesco” and “Cristoforo.” And scholars sometimes extend this practice to the occasional famous modern figure such as “Peter” the Great (“Pyotr”) or “Catherine” the Great (“Yekaterina”) of Russia. You know they’re great because we dignify them with English names.

I started thinking about all this inconsistency because I recognize that I’m part of the problem. I’m writing a doctoral dissertation on twelfth-century Limoges (in modern-day France), where they spoke the Old Occitan language. My main source is a chronicle by a monk from Vigeois who called himself “Gaufredus” in Latin. When the French write about him, they call him “Geoffroi.” English-language scholars have called him “Geoffrey.” I had to decide which to use. I write in English, but an important point in my dissertation is that we tend to imagine twelfth-century Limoges from the perspective of the kings of England (who ruled it at the time), rather than from the perspective of the people who lived there. To call the monk “Geoffrey” is to imagine him in English. But French isn’t better. Limoges was not yet under the rule of the kings of France. Only after my period did the French conquer it and (with the help of a subsequent crusade) the rest of the Occitan-speaking region south of the Loire. So “Geoffroi” seems wrong too. I began to think about the fact that this monk surely spoke Occitan in his daily life, and wondered if I should therefore translate his name into its Old Occitan form, “Jaufres.” But if I’m sticking with Occitan, then I should really call the King of England “Aenrics,” not his usual English name “Henry” (which never made much sense anyway, since he spoke Old French). And in that case, his sons, “Henry” the Young King, “Richard” the Lionheart, “Geoffrey” of Brittany, and “John” Lackland, would become “Aenrics,” “Richart,” “Jaufres,” and “Joan.” That’s what Jaufres of Vigeois would have called his rulers, at any rate.

But I gave up the idea. It was pointed out to me that my readers might get impatient reading a dissertation full of Occitan names, that those names would confuse library search engines, that publishers already have approved standards for names. I decided that I’d rather be read than right. So “Geoffrey,” “Henry,” “Richard,” and “John” it is. It’s hypocritical, but it pays to fit in.

And yet I still worry about the signals we send with names. Not just for the sake of Occitan speakers, who are currently watching their language in its death throes after centuries of targeted cultural genocide by the French state. It’s also for the other parts of the world that suffered racism, colonialism, and imperialism in modern times. Within Europe English speakers tried to suppress Welsh, French speakers tried to suppress Breton, German speakers tried to suppress Prussian, Spanish speakers tried to suppress Catalan, Italian speakers tried to suppress Sicilian, etc., etc., etc. These regional power imbalances continue today, and we take sides when we choose to translate names into one language or the other. Oftentimes historians, in our conventions, tend to default to the naming practices of the powerful over those of the weak, or else tend to Anglicize the names of groups of people who have wielded power in recent centuries.[3]

It gets even worse when we think about places outside of Europe. Take the history of the crusades to the eastern Mediterranean. All the names in history books are translated, of course. But we tend to Anglicize only the names of crusaders and other Christians (or, sometimes, Jews). We translate non-Christian names into our Latin alphabet, but we do not truly Anglicize them. Consequently a crusader named “Estiennes” de Thornan becomes “Stephen” of Thornham when we read about him. But we render the fuller name of Saladin, the Muslim who captured Jerusalem from the Christians in 1187, as “Yusuf ibn Ayyub.” Which name sounds more familiar to modern English-speakers, and which one sounds more foreign? Which person is likely to gain more sympathy from English-speakers once they hear the names? “Yusuf” and “Ayyub,” incidentally, are scriptural names with accepted English forms, and “ibn” means “son.” So we could easily call the sultan “Joseph ‘Saladin’ Jobson,” if we wanted, and call the crusader “Estiennes.” With that change, I think a lot of English speakers would imagine Joe Jobson as being more like themselves than Estiennes. They might even root for Joe, for a change, over crusaders whose names drip with Frenchiness. Notice something else that happens: the gap between medieval Christians and medieval Muslims suddenly seems smaller. We begin to notice that Muslims and Christians used the same names to pay tribute to religious figures whom they jointly admired. And medieval people recognized this fact. Even pro-crusader propaganda written to denounce Saladin commented on the fact that he shared a first name with the Patriarch Joseph. We modern people are the ones likely to miss this fact, since we have insisted that we cannot Anglicize Muslim names the way we regularly Anglicize French, Irish, or German names.

I don’t mean to imply that we should Anglicize all medieval Muslim names. There are more Muslims living in the English-speaking world today than ever, and history can help us to normalize name forms like “Yusuf” and “Ayyub” in countries where Islamophobia runs tragically deep. The problem is not that we fail to Anglicize medieval Muslim names, but rather that we do Anglicize the crusaders’ names. Even crusaders’ Christian allies who spoke Armenian, Greek, or Arabic are more likely to get names translated into English than are Muslims from the same regions. The consequence is that we make medieval crusaders feel less foreign to us than they would if we kept their original names. As long as our orientalizing culture treats Arabic name forms as exotic, we ought to do our best to make sure that the crusaders seem equally exotic to us. All modern people (regardless of religious heritage) are equally far from understanding the perspective of medieval Christians as from understanding the perspective of medieval Muslims. Perhaps we should stop using names to help us pretend that medieval crusaders would fit in with (white) society in the modern English-speaking world. And, for that matter, to stop pretending that the English of the time of King Eadvveard would seem less foreign in modern England than would medieval Russians or medieval Mongolians. The medieval English, Russians, and Mongolians surely would have more in common with one another than they would with any of us moderns, regardless of geography.

There’s more to be gained if we stopped inconsistently Anglicizing names. We would begin to notice how widespread names could become when a certain saint or ruler won the medieval world’s admiration. We would better understand how, in the pre-modern world, before the ascent of the culture of fixed bureaucratic documentation, people engaged in name switching as they moved between the vernacular and prestige languages, or as they traveled from one region to another.[4] And we would begin to hear the beauty and the poetry that medieval parents wanted others to hear when their child’s name was spoken.

But can historians do better? Can we really expect a busy medievalist to spend their time rewriting an index? I don’t know. I do know that I haven’t gotten names right. In my published work I have been as inconsistent as anyone else. Going forward, I still wrestle with basic questions: when should I Anglicize? what name form do I choose when there are multiple options in English? if I see a name in Latin and want to use the medieval vernacular, how can I determine the best local form? I must answer these questions for the sake of my future writing. Hopefully my peers will do the same (and, presumably, offer solutions that have not occurred to me). In the meantime, our priority should be consistency when we write textbooks, public history books, and internet content – i.e. the platforms that offer historians the most influence over public opinion. Beyond just historians, though, I hope that any filmmakers, video game designers, or Renaissance Faire operators who read this will also take names more seriously. We can all work together to get the word out to history lovers that you cannot take a name for granted. Choosing a name for a medieval person, like all good history, takes hard work.

[1] By whom I mean English-language historians, since scholars who work in other languages sometimes do things differently.

[2] Hopefully somebody someday will write an interesting thesis by comparing Notes on Names across subdisciplines of History. 

[3] An additional complicating factor is the history of contact between England (and other English-speaking places) and various regions around the world. Some “foreign” name forms, such as “Cnut,” received an accepted English form as early as the medieval period.  “Mohammad” (and its equivalents), for example, had a recognizable English form long before it became a common English-language name in the twentieth century, due to the long history of contact between England and the Islamic world. But other names, especially those that originated in regions that encountered the English-speaking world in more recent centuries, still do not have widely-recognized English forms. The result is that within English some “foreign” names seem more foreign than do others.

[4] Many famous examples exist of medieval people who chose to alter their names. The English-born monk Ordricus (xiii, 45) found it necessary to assimilate by taking the name Vitalis “in place of my English name, which sounded harsh to the Normans.” Whereas for the cleric Giraldus (p. 171), the foreign, Gallic connotations of his name were useful within his native Wales. Both men Latinized their names so as to participate in elite literary culture.

In certain regions, individuals, families, and even entire communities would alter their naming practices in response to changing socio-linguistic circumstances. Alex Metcalfe (pp. 88-90) has critiqued traditional onomastic studies of central medieval Sicily in part for their failure to recognize that families could mix Greek, Arabic, and Latin in their naming practices even without converting between religions, and has pointed out that some individuals such as “Muḥammad/Bānzūl” and “Peter/Aḥmad” could wield entirely different names in Arabic than they did in Greek or Latin. Richard Bulliet (p. 68), who did use onomastics to study conversion to Islam, hypothesized that some converts to Islam in Iran intentionally gave their children religiously-ambiguous names in order to help them find acceptance among Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike.                        

Some medieval people, such as John/Eleanor Rykener, also went back and forth between different names for reasons of sexuality or gender identity.