Emotions in the Household: Emotion Words and Metaphors in Domesday Book Personal Names

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the set of emotion-related personal names recorded in the Domesday Book. Through the fine-grained analysis of the themes used in these names, this paper proposes a semantic description of late Old English personal names, which have been classified into the following seven name sub-categories: happiness, joy, love, tenderness, pride, anger, and fear . This analysis shows that emotion-related vocabulary was a favorite personal name element in post-Conquest England. Furthermore, it proposes some of the general tendencies behind name-giving practices, especially in relation to (i) gender distribution of emotion themes and concepts and (ii) frequent lexical combinations of emotion-related themes. Finally, the paper offers an interpretation of the metaphorization processes that motivated the development of some of these combinations of words and their usage as personal names in Anglo-Saxon England.keywords Old English, Domesday Book, emotions, Anglo-Saxon, name-giving, conceptual metaphor and metonymy Aims and scopeThis paper analyzes the Old English emotional vocabulary used in the vernacular names, both monothematic and dithematic, recorded around 1086 in the Domesday Book (hence DB; Darby, 1979;Forde, 1986; Hallam, 1986;Wood, 1999) and subsidiary surveys. The relevance of the DB as a source of information for the history of the English language in general (Fisiak, 1984;1985;1990;Díaz-Vera, 1996), and of late Old English onomastics in particular (von Feilitzen, 1937;Clark, 1992;Okasha, 2011) has long been recognized by scholars. In spite of the high number of nameforms recorded in the DB, its use is not without problems. One major complication is related to the oral nature of the process of data collection. The spellings used by the royal commissioners who interviewed local informants are both irregular and unreliable, in so far as not all of them used the traditional orthographic rules