Delancy Place has a fascinating quotation from Susan Squire’s book, I Don’t, which looks like a dreadful book on the history of marriage perspectives, on how The Great Plague changed the way parents named their children.
“The centrality of religion in medieval European life is impossible to overstate. … If you want to pray, you go to your parish and submit to the direction of a priest. If you want to confess, you sit in the confessional and [tell] your sins to the man on the other side of the partition, who pronounces judgement and penance. …
“Then along comes the Black Death, mowing down the sinful and the sinless indiscriminately. … You can be healthy on Monday, infected on Tuesday, and a corpse on Saturday, leaving precious little time to wipe the sin slate clean by confessing and repenting in preparation for your personal judgement day. The biggest hurdle of all might have been luring the priest, any priest, to one’s deathbed of contagion in order to perform last rites, the final cleansing. If a cleric does show up, he might charge an outrageous price for mumbling a few prayers. Stories of deathbed fee-gougers also abound, adding to the popular perception that extravagance and greed motivate more often than not. …
After that, people apparently drifted away from the church proper and clung to the mercy of the saints who were associated with pain and suffering.
I wonder what they named the children before the Plague. I had the idea that saints’ names came with the conversion to Christianity. So much for assumptions.
I’m fond of the names the old Puritans inflicted on their kids. I have a book that talks about it around here somewhere, but speaking from memory I remember one family that named a child, “Samuel Hewed Agag in Pieces.” I can’t recall whether this was one of the notable Barebones family (I’m not making this up). The Bareboneses liked to hang long Bible verse names on their kids, culminating with “If Christ Had Not Come to Save Thee, Thou Wouldst Have Been Damned Barebones.” He grew up to be an eminent scholar, known to his friends as Dr. Damned Barebones.
It’s true! I swear!
Wow. I wondered about the names too. Maybe names like Matthew, James, John, Peter, Gregory, and names of popes were prominent.
I’m pretty sure popes’ names are almost always saints’ names. Perhaps this relates to the “baptismal name,” where a Catholic has both a given name and a saint’s name. I know that in Scandinavia, the old heathen names, even ones that included gods’ names, continued in use after the conversion.
For what I suspect is a more historically accurate (certainly more balanced) look at names through history, check out Names Through the Ages by Teresa Norman, c. 1999, Berkley. It follows name popularities and history in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, and the United States, from centuries back to the present. Surnames are included as well as female names and male names. I wouldn’t hand it to any expectant parent who might cotton to names like Wulfthryth, though. (It’s an early female name from England, meaning Wolf Strength.) Actually, it’s less of a baby name book and more of a history buff book, or writer’s resource. Interesting stuff.
I might not get to it today, but I’ll try to track down some of the pre- and post-plague name trends.
For more on the history of marriage perspectives, there’s a chapter on “The Family in History” in The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family by William J. Bennett, c. 2001, Doubleday.
Yes, that’d be interesting, Kathryn.