. Among the aristocracy in medieval France, one’s personal name was an integral part of one’s identity. The name attached the person firmly to a group of relatives. Between late antiquity and the end of the 11th century, a person had only...

A personal name is the proper name identifying an individual person. It is nearly universal for a human person to have a name; the rare exceptions occur in the cases of mentally disturbed parents, or feral children growing up in isolation. A personal...