What’s in a First Name? The Correlation of Personal Identity with Economic Autonomy in Medieval Flanders

Abstract:A comparison of late-fourteenth-century mortmain payments from Courtrai (a small commercial city) with those from Tielt (a nearby rural community) in the county of Flanders reveals that the bailiff of Courtrai routinely identified women using a personal name, while the bailiff of Tielt slotted them, unnamed, into the relational categories of wife, widow, and daughter. This article argues that the marked difference in identificatory patterns between Courtrai and Tielt indexes—albeit in surprisingly distinct ways—the degree of agency enjoyed by women within each community. Whereas Tielt’s practice of identifying women primarily by their familial affiliation, leaving most of them nameless, likely reflects the embedding of women within the household, with its concomitant diminution in personal autonomy, first-name usage in Courtrai correlates with a degree of relative economic and social agency.