Names of women in late 16th century Hungarian court records from Transylvania

by Julia P. Szent-Györgyi, known in the SCA as Kolosvari Arpadne Julia

© 2011

Introduction

This data is based on Demény Lajos & Pataki József, editors: Székely oklevéltár (new series, volume 1; Kriterion Könyvkiadó, Bukarest, 1983), which is a transcription, with indexes, of the surviving record books from the court at Székelyudvarhely (literally “Szekler-court-place”) in Transylvania. These records were written in a mixture of Latin and Hungarian, often switching languages mid-sentence or even mid-phrase. The cases recorded range from disagreements over property, to hiring of lawyers, to witness statements in criminal prosecutions.

According to the introduction, the transcription is fairly faithful: abbreviations are silently expanded or standardized, capitalization and other punctuation follows modern conventions, and diacritics are simplified due to typographic constraints (for example, ý, ÿ, and y with a single dot above are rendered as either ÿ or plain y, depending on context), but spelling is otherwise unchanged from the manuscript. The material is presented chronologically by numbered files or notebooks. Each file can consist of multiple cases, and some cases are spread over multiple files.

I used the index of people and places to write out all of the feminine names found in the text, discovering and correcting some indexing errors along the way. This article consists of a quick overview of feminine names, a list of given names with a frequency table, a discussion of name structures with examples and a note on marital names, and a spreadsheet containing the full names. Analysis and translation of the surnames will be a project for another day.

A Quick Overview of 16th c. Hungarian Feminine Names

Just like boys, Hungarian girls were given a (single) name at birth or baptism, and got their family names from their fathers: Cybre Anna and her younger brother Cybre Ambrus presumably had a father with the surname Cybre (a type of sour soup). In Hungarian writing, as in speech, the family name preceded the given name. Much writing at the time was in Latin, however, and in Latin, names were Latinized: given names were translated to the nearest standard Latin equivalent, modulo the scribe’s knowledge of names, and the family name, untranslated, was written after the given name. Sometimes translation changed only the order, because the given name was the same in both languages: Cybre Anna would be Anna Cybre in Latin. Sometimes, however, the change was more drastic: Anna’s brother would be Ambrosius Cybre, and there was one gentleman who was identified as Gywlafi Lestar in one place, and Eustachius Gywlaffi in another.

When a girl grew up and got married, she still had her maiden name, unchanged, but she also acquired a married name: her husband’s full name plus the suffix -ne (-né in modern spelling), which means ‘wife, Mrs., woman’. When Cybre Anna married Dios Ferencz, she acquired the name Dios Ferenczne. Depending on context, she could use both her married and her full maiden name together (e.g. Dios Ferenczne Cybre Anna), or her married name with just her given name (e.g. Dios Ferenczne Anna), or just her married name, or just her maiden name. Notice that she cannot simply take Dios (‘with walnuts’) as her surname: Dios Anna (or Anna Dios in Latin) would be a different woman—her daughter, perhaps.

Latin renderings of married women’s names are somewhat varied, but generally use some word for ‘wife’ along with the possessive form of the husband’s Latinized name. Many sources use uxor, but the court records presented here favor consors, with a few other possibilities: the woman named Fanchaly Martonne Katalin in one place is called coniunx Marthini Fanchalj Catherina elsewhere.

In some smaller villages, family names were rare, and literal bynames were used instead: Szentkirali Gaspar, ki lakott vgian az meg nevezett Zentkiraly falvaban ... Gaspar Simon, ki fia volt Zentkirali Gasparnak. En penig, Simon Janos, Gaspar Simon fia vagiok.... ‘Caspar of Szentkirály, who lived in the aforementioned village of Szentkirály... Simon Caspar, who was the son of Caspar of Szentkirály. And I, John Simon, am the son of Simon Caspar.... ’ I did not find such an obvious case of feminine literal bynames, but that’s probably because of the smaller number of examples.

The one seeming exception to Hungarian surname-first name order occurs with occupations: it is not unusual to find examples like Istuan Kouaczjne Sophia ‘Mrs. Stephen the smith, Sophia’ alongside ones like Kowaczj Mihalyne Anna ‘Mrs. Michael Smith, Anna’. The difference is that in the first case, the occupation is meant literally, while in the second it’s a surname: Steve was definitely a smith, Mike probably wasn’t. Titles and terms of address, such as asszony ‘lady, [married] woman, goodwife’, behave the same way: if they’re used literally, they follow the name.

Feminine Given Names

Notation: headers are in brackets, and use the modern standard spellings of the names as a guide to pronunciation. The period spellings are in italics, exactly as found in the text; those with suffixes are marked with an ‘s’, those in a Latin context are marked with ‘L’, and Latin oblique cases are marked ‘L-o’. Numbers in parentheses are item numbers, referring to the spreadsheet of full names. (Nominative forms of names marked ‘s’ or ‘L-o’ can be found in the spreadsheet.)

Name Frequency (by modern, standard form)

Name Spellings

Name Structures

There are 406 mentions of a woman by name in this volume of the court records. In categorizing these items into broad patterns, I have counted as name elements all given names, as well as anything that the -né ‘Mrs.’ suffix can attach to under the right circumstances: surnames or bynames, and occupations. Relationship terms, places of residence, and terms of address are counted as modifiers of the basic patterns. For example, Nagj Istuanne, galambfaluaj, Agota aszoni is categorized as a three-element name: the husband’s surname is Nagj ‘Big, Elder’, his given name is Istuan ‘Stephen’, and his wife’s given name is Agota ‘Agatha’. The word galambfaluaj means ‘of Galambfalva [Pigeon-ville]’, and aszoni is one possible spelling of the basic feminine term of address or title asszony, roughly equivalent in use to ‘milady’ or ‘goodwife’. As another example, relicta quondam Valentini Varga, Chatharina de Kerezturffalua is also a three-element name.

I started out intending to separate Latin names from Hungarian ones, but gave up after encountering examples like honesta mulier relicta Sofalj Birthalanne, Elizabetha, which uses the Hungarian form of the husband’s name (surname first, and a Hungarian form of his given name, with the Hungarian marital suffix at the end) in the midst of otherwise Latin text. In any case, only about one name in twelve is in Latin.

Single-element names: 23 total (5.7%).

Of these, 21 use the woman’s given name (with or without modifiers), while 2 use the husband’s surname or occupation plus the marital suffix.
Modifiers: 1 place of residence, 4 asszony, 9 relationship terms (4 felesege ‘his wife’, 4 leania ‘his daughter’, 1 onokam ‘my grandchild’), 1 ethnic description.

Mrs.-type names (two-element names that do not include the woman’s given name): 154 items (37.9%).

Of these, 126 are unmodified: just X Yne, where X is the husband’s surname, and Y is his given name.
Modifiers: 12 places of residence, 2 asszony, 7 relationship terms (3 relicta, 1 consors, 2 nehai ‘the late’, 1 felesege), 8 use a literal occupation and hence reverse the order (Y Xne), and 2 have multi-word bynames.

Maiden names (two-element names that do not include a man’s name): 16 examples (3.9%).

Of these, 11 are unmodified, consisting of the woman’s surname and given name.
Modifiers: 2 places of residence, 3 asszony.

Three-element names: 178 items (43.8%).

The basic pattern here is X Yne Z, where X is the husband’s byname, Y is his given name, and Z is the woman’s given name. There are 50 examples of this bare pattern, without modifiers.
Modifiers: 50 places of residence, 71 asszony, 9 non-wife relationships (4 arvaia ‘his orphan’, 4 leania, 1 filia), 20 ‘wife’ (12 consors, 4 coniunx, 4 felesege), 15 ‘widow’ (12 relicta, 3 nehai), 4 multi-word bynames, and 6 occupations (reverse order: Y Xne Z).

Four-element names: 24 items (5.9%).

Of these, 5 are just X Yne A B, where X is the husband’s byname, Y is his given name, A is the woman’s byname, and B is her given name.
Modifiers: 1 place of residence, 9 asszony, 9 relationships (4 nehai, 2 relicta, 2 felesege, 1 ura ‘her husband/lord’), 3 reverse order (AB XYne), 6 literal occupations (YXne), and 1 non-wife (a man’s sister).

Miscellaneous: 11 items don’t quite fit any of the categories above (2.7%).

Of these, 3 mention more than one male relative, 3 give both a byname and an occupation for the husband, and most are complex phrases rather than single names.

A special note on marital names

More than three-fourths (316) of the items use the marital suffix -ne. 22 of these are attached to the husband’s occupation (<man’s given> + <occupation>-ne), two are on the husband’s surname or occupation alone, and one is attached to the woman’s ethnicity (using in this case the more basic meaning of ‘woman’, generally rounded to “nő” in modern usage and spelling). The rest (291 examples) are appended to the husband’s full name in Hungarian: <surname> + <man’s given>-ne. This most common format may omit the woman’s personal name entirely (144 examples), or it may be followed by her given name (135 examples) or her surname plus given name (10 examples). (There are also a few examples where the woman’s full name precedes her husband’s name.) Notice that in no case does the suffix attach to just the man’s given name – his surname must precede it – and the only two examples where the suffix is used without the man’s given name are single-element shorthand references. In other words, this data does not unfortunately support the modern practice of using <husband’s surname>-né + <woman’s given>. Notice also that the Hungarian suffix goes with Hungarian names, not Latin ones: with a few unusual exceptions (where the scribe appears to have momentarily forgotten which language he was using), -ne is used with Hungarian forms of all given names, and with surnames first.