Male vs Female in the mirror of Russian Dual Christian Naming (16th–17th Centuries)

Abstract

The paper deals with the special features of Russian dual Christian naming—that is, the practice of giving a lay person an additional Christian name, other than his/her baptismal name. In the Middle Ages in Russia, a man could not under any circumstances get a female anthroponym as a second Christian name, and a woman, respectively, could not get a male anthroponym. In particular, no variations with respect to the calendar tradition, which transform male names into female names and vice versa, were allowed. This markedly contraposes the choice of the second Christian name for a lay woman to the choice of the monastic name for a nun. The work examines a number of incidents that would seem to violate this rigor of the gender distribution of anthroponyms, and discusses a number of related problems associated with the multiplicity of personal names in pre-Petrine Rus’.