Nomina. Forenames in Late Medieval Italy: a new approach to social and political history

English version

Can onomastics be regarded as a source for the study of medieval social identities and political institutions? Such are the questions from which the Nomina project plans to set out in order to approach the study of personal names (not surnames) in late medieval Italy in an innovative way, providing an original contribution to some of the main topics in social and political history. So far, the study of personal names – which has always been closely connected to research on the emergence of surnames – has chiefly been regarded as a way to investigate changes in kinship structures. The project aims to explore onomastic sources from a different angle by highlighting the interaction between individual names and other forms of political and social identity. We believe that the study of personal names, in addition to constituting a largely unexplored field of enquiry, might also pave the way to approach many crucial topics in Medieval Studies in a radically new way: for example the connection between rulers and the ruled and the relationship between men and women on the one hand; and class, communal, and professional institutions on the other.