Some Guidelines for Writing Articles for this Archive

• Include an introduction to your list. Identify your sources, with full bibliographical information. Describe your methods: How did you select names? How did you analyze them? How did you deal with variant spellings, etc? How are you presenting the data?
• If you've worked from a primary source, describe it: language, period, location, nature of the documents, identities of the original authors, etc. Discuss any problems you had reading or interpreting your source, and any assumptions you made. If you used other sources along the way, include them in your bibliography. You may want to give a sample of your source, reproducing the original as closely as possible.
• If you worked from secondary sources, look for a note from the author describing how names were translated from his medieval sources. Did he translate them from Latin? Did he modernize or standardize the spellings of names?
• List given names by frequency, with masculine and feminine names in separate lists. Group variants and pet forms of names, unless these seem to be used as independent names in the culture you're studying. In many articles with long lists of names, we've listed the common names in a table but the rarer names in a paragraph-formatted list. This format emphasize the common names by giving them more page space. Alphabetical lists are also useful, so feel free to provide them as well; but the frequency list is more important since it gives people a feel for how names were actually used in the culture.
• List surnames or bynames alphabetically, perhaps broken down by category of meaning (e.g. patronymic, occupational, locative, etc.). The distribution of surnames is rarely as skewed as the distribution of given names, so an alphabetical list usually doesn't obscure important information. Separate men's and women's bynames and analyze them separately if there are significant gender differences in your data.
• Present large lists of data compactly. It isn't necessary to include details of each citation in your tables of names, like the page where you found a name. That information is important, but it can be presented in a secondary listing -- the raw data or an index. It's more important for the reader to be able to scan the list of names comfortably.
• Include a separate page or pages with your raw data. This has two benefits: It allows people to see what complete names looked like, and it lets future researchers use your work as a starting point.

To submit an article to the Medieval Names Archive, please contact Ursula Georges at ursula at yarntheory dot net.

The Medieval Names Archive is published by Ursula Georges. It was historically published by the Academy of Saint Gabriel.
Copyright on individual articles belongs to their authors.
http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/guidelines.shtml