Namen von Heiden und Christen

Abstract

The spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire made the connection between religious concepts and names more important for the early Christians. Late Antiquity witnesses the beginnings of specifically Christian name giving. This process is characterized by various points of contact with other religions as well as the need to distance oneself from other religions. This text examines aspects of early medieval Christian name giving and its incorporation of both ancient and Gentile pagan naming patterns. Guiding questions are: Why did the Christian name inventory — very differently from the East — not take a stronger hold in the West? Are there early Medieval texts referring to the semantic content of personal names that were considered to be Christian or heathen? Different from the Roman East, where we find a slow but lasting Christianization of personal names in late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, a similar development cannot be traced on western Roman soil. While East Rome spread the practice of giving Christian names to the Slavic missionary areas in the course of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church did not exert a similar influence on the choice of personal names. Name changes as an expression of a conversion to Christianity did not play a prominent role. The pagan theophoric personal names of Greek-Latin Antiquity were not completely eliminated, and new Germanic personal names became part of the name inventory of the early Romance languages as a result of the prestige the ruling Gentile elites enjoyed. It is striking that in the texts by clergymen that contain interpretations of names hardly any comment can be found regarding the theophoric heathen name elements even though there are indications that the names of the gods were understood.