ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2052 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2052 ************************************ 22 May 2000 From: (Josh Mittleman) Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked whether <Lais Dias deLlerna> is an appropriate name for a converso woman in the period of the Spanish Inquisition. Here is what we have found. The Inquisition was established in Spain in the 1480s and the Jews were forced to convert or leave Spain in 1492 [1]. We will therefore focus on the late 15th and 16th centuries. Jewish converts adopted Christian names as a symbol of their conversion, and gave their children names typical of the Christian population as a whole. Although some maintained secret Jewish names, it was dangerous to reveal these in public; however, some converts returned to Judaism after leaving Spain and re-adopted their original names [2]. What sort of name you choose depends on the details of your persona. If you want to re-create one of the majority of conversos who abandoned their Judaism, then you'll want a typical Spanish Christian name. If you want to re-create a secret Jew in post-expulsion Spain, then you might want to choose two names, one Jewish that you use only in secret and one Christian that you use in public. (On the other hand, Jewish names in late-period Spain weren't obviously Jewish: One Jewish woman named <Gracia Mendes> changed her name to <Beatrice de Luna> upon converting [7].) You wrote that you had found <Lais> listed in pre-Inquisition records at the website www.sephardim.com [8]. We looked there and found <Lais> listed only as a surname, not a given name. In fact, all the names listed on that site are surnames. We checked our sources for period Iberian names, but we found no example of <Lais> used as a given name [9]. A search on the web did turn up several modern examples of the given name, but it is not unusual in the modern Hispanic world for surnames to be used as given names, so this doesn't tell us anything about period practice. <Lais> would probably be a fine late-period surname, but we recommend that you choose a different given name. If you'd like, we can suggest some similar-sounding late-period Spanish names; or you can browse the name lists available in the Iberian section of our Medieval Names Archive, http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/iberian.html. <Dias> is a fine family name for your period; it was quite common both in this spelling and as <Diaz> [3]. We haven't found clear support for the place name <Llerna>. The website you used does attribute the surname <Dias de Llerna> to Inquisitorial records from the New World [8], and there are a number of modern examples of <Llerna> on the web. It may be a variant of <Llerena>, a southern Spanish city that was the scene of tribunals against Judaizers in the 1460s [4]. This is the modern spelling of that name, and we have also found it in 15th and 16th century records [3, 5]. A name like <Luisa Dias de Llerena> would be a fine choice for the persona you described. The locative surname would have been pronounced \day l~er-AY-n@\, where \@\ represents the sound of the <a> in <sofa> and \l~\ represents a palatalized \l\, which is the sound of <ll> in Spanish words like <llama> or the <lli> in the French <million> [6]. We hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Pedro de Alcazar, Raquel Buenaventura, Juliana de Luna, Antonio Miguel Santos de Borja, Talan Gwynek, Salvador Paolo de Barcelona, Adelaide de Beaumont, Aelfwyn aet Gyrwum, and Barak Raz. For the Academy, Arval Benicoeur 22 May 2000 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - References [1] "Spain, history of" Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. <http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?eu=115206&sctn=4> [Accessed May 9 2000]. [2] Roth, Cecil, _A History of the Marranos_ (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), pp.201-202, 242. [3] Juliana de Luna, "Spanish Names from the Late 15th Century" (WWW: J. Mittleman, 1999-2000). http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/juliana/isabella/ [4] Roth, p.39. [5] Romera Iruela, Luis, and Ma. del Carmen Galbis Di/ez, _Catalogo de Pasajeros a Indias, Siglos XVI, XVII, y XVIII_ (Sevilla: Archivo General de Indias, 1980). [6] Penny, Ralph, _A History of the Spanish Language_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.93. In modern southern Spain, <ll> is pronounced like the 'y' in <yes>. That pronunciation was not mentioned by grammarians before the 19th century, but probably had begun to develop in the late 15th century. \y\ may be appropriate for some dialects in your period. [7] Roth, Cecil, _Dona Gracia of the House of Nasi_ (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, reprint, 1992). [8] Sephardim.com, accessed 12 May 2000. http://www.sephardim.com/namelist.shtml?mode=form&from=D&to=D&Search=Search [9] We did find <Lais> as an ancient Greek given name, but we found no reason to believe that the Greek name was ever imported to Iberia. Fraser, P.M., and E. Matthews, "The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names" (WWW: Oxford University, 1998). http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/