I was intrigued by a recent blog post by Anéžka Liška z Kolína, in which she describes a technique for locating names in the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources from a particular region of interest.
However, it seemed to me like there ought to be an easier way to quickly find the relevant sources for such an exploration — a quick way to see all of the bibliographic entries related to a given region and language.
As DMNES doesn’t currently provide such an index, I made a simple mirror of the site and whipped up a quick-and-dirty Perl script to look for citations and build an index page:
A Geographic Bibliography of DMNES
In addition to the geographic index, there’s also a linguistic index which groups by language first, and then by region. There’s also a simple alphabetical listing of sources.
An Example
As an example of how this might be used, let’s take a look at the entry for Wales, located at the end of that page:
As we can see, DMNES contains names from Wales in four languages: Early Modern English, Latin, Middle Welsh, and modern Welsh.
Located under each language is a series of links to the sources cited for that location/language combination, along with the number of entries and time period.
Clicking any of those source links will bring you to the DMNES page listing all of the names found in that source, across all of the regions and eras it covers.
So if we’re looking for names that might be found in Wales during the twelfth century, we can see that the largest collection is Pryce-1st which has names recorded in Latin, plus a couple of additional choices in ArchCambIII which is written in Welsh. On the other hand, if we’re interested in the sixteenth century we can find names in RegLlantrithyd that are in Early Modern English, while RegCon1 has names in Latin, Welsh, and Early Modern English.
But Wait, There’s More
[Updated, August 21:] I’ve now extended this same script to also display the individual name entries for each language and region:
When you click any of the region or language names on that page, you’ll find a listing of attested names.
[Updated, August 23:] Thanks to some suggestions from the community, these pages now include chronological breakdowns by century, as well as separate listing for feminine and masculine names.
Try It Out
I hope this resource is of use to some folks as they’re exploring the range of names found across medieval Europe. Give it a try and let me know if you find any problems!
Technical Sidebar
For the technically curious, here’s a quick rundown of how I created the index pages.
First I made a mirror of the DMNES site, skipping the /cite/ pages as I did not need those details. This process was throttled to avoid putting an excessive load on the DMNES server, so it took a couple of hours to complete.
wget --recursive --wait=5 --level=0 --page-requisites --convert-links --adjust-extension http://dmnes.orgThen I put together a small Perl script which looks for citations on those pages, groups them together in various ways, and outputs the results wrapped in bits of HTML snagged from the DMNES site for visual continuity.
Then I ran that script against the mirrored name pages to generate the various output files.
perl build-index.pl dmnes.org/name/*The last step was to copy those new files to a web-accessible directory.
rsync *.html digitalherald.org:~/public_html/dmnesIt’s not pretty, but it got the job done.