Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 608

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 608

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/608

Some of the Academy's early reports contain errors that we haven't yet corrected. Please use it with caution.

Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked for our opinion of the Russian name <Anastacia Patricia Ivanova Kurakin> and of your design for your arms. Here is what we have found.

Most of the elements you've used in your name are correct for our period, but the way you've combined them is not. In general, medieval Russian names were much simpler than modern Russian names.

Russian names started only as a given name, adding the patronymic around the 10th century, and finally the surname (from the patronymic constructions) only in the late 15th or early 16th century. The surname did not become common, in fact, until the 18th century. [1]

Women's names tended to be even simpler than men's names. For the details, I suggest you read an article by Paul Wickenden of Thanet, which is available on the web at:

http://www.sca.org/heraldry/paul/zgrammar.html

This article is the introduction to Lord Paul's "Dictionary of Russian Names", which is our source for information on this subject.

The upshot is that your name, with two given names, a patronymic, and a surname, is too complicated for a woman in period Russia. We suggest that you drop one of the given names and perhaps one of the surnames.

<Anastacia> is a fine name for period Russia, though the spelling you've chosen does not appear to be correct. A Russian name would usually have been written in Cyrillic characters, of course, but the transliteration should follow normal rules of spelling. The last consonant should be an 's', not a 'c'. The 'c' would imply an incorrect pronunciation (like the last syllable of <Patricia>). Period examples include:

Anastasiia 1225

Nastka 1150
Nastasiia 13-14th C
Nostas'ia 14-15th C
Nastas'ia 1476
Nastia 1506

<Patricia> is indeed a Latin name, a feminine form of <Patricius>, the name of an early saint. The masculine form did make its way into late-period Russia. The saint is mentioned as early as 1356 as <Patrikii>, but we do not find the name in normal use until the 15th century:

Patrakei mid 15th
Patrekei 1530
Patrikei 1597
Patrakii 1615
Patrak 1635

Our source does not record any feminine form of the name in Russia. If you would like your _father's_ name to be <Patrikei>, you could use the patronymic <Patrikeiva>. The masculine form of that name, <Patrikeiv>, is recorded in 1573.

<Ivanova> is a correct Russian patronymic, recorded in 1568. Other period forms of the same name are:

Ivaniaia 12th C
Ioanova 1331
Evanova second half 15th C

<Kurakin> was originally a masculine patronymic derived from the given name <Kuraka>. It is recorded in 1608. The equivalent feminine form would be <Kurakina>, but that name is not recorded in our source. In period, it would have been used literally, i.e. by a woman whose father was named <Kurakin>.

Putting it all together and considering Lord Paul's comments on the structure of women's names, we recommend that you use <Anastasiia Kurakina> or <Anastasiia Patrikieva>. <Anastasiia Ivanova> would be equally correct, but you could not register it because it would conflict with "Anastasia Ivanovna". Combining the patronymic and the surname, as <Anastasiia Ivanova Kurakina>, would be appropriate from about the 14th century onward [4] and would avoid the conflict. Lord Paul explains that there was a great deal of variation in the form of women's names, so we strongly recommend that you read his article.

The heraldic design you described in your letter would be blazoned "Gules, a siberian tiger rampant argent maintaining a scythe within a bordure Or". This design is not medieval-style armory.

Any discussion of arms for a Russian persona immediately runs into a difficult fact: There was no heraldry in period Russia. Late in our period, a few noble families used arms that they had acquired in other countries, but no heraldic system developed in Russia itself until well after our period [2, 3].

Many Societyfolk face the same problem: Their personas come from cultures where heraldry did not exist. It is a sufficiently common problem that we've written a short article discussing your options. You can find it on the web at:

http://www.itd.umich.edu/~ximenez/s.gabriel/faq/nonheraldic.html

You may or may not decide to use arms; that depends on your feelings about authenticity and persona. If you do choose to use arms, then it is probably a mistake to try to design arms that say "I am Russian". That's basically impossible, since Russians didn't use arms. Instead, you might try to design arms that fit the heraldic style of one of the countries in Eastern or Central Europe that _did_ have heraldry in period: Poland, Hungary, eastern Germany, Sweden, Bohemia. If you want to do that, let us know and we'll be happy to help. It would help if you could be more specific about when in period you want to set your persona.

We have not found any examples of natural tigers used in period arms. There is a fairly rare heraldic monster called a "tyger", which is based on the image of the tiger passed to medieval Europe through bestiaries. It looks like a heraldic lion with a different head. You can find a picture of this beast on the web at:

http://www.eastkingdom.org/images/gelre_half.gif

The blue beast is a tyger.

I hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions; or if you prefer, you can send questions about your name to Lord Paul; write us to get in contact with him. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Zenobia Naphtali and Herveus d'Ormonde.

For the Academy,

Arval Benicoeur


References

[1] Paul Goldschmidt, "A Dictionary of Period Russian Names" (WWW: SCA,

Inc., 1996).

[2] Dr. Mikhail Y. Medvedev, Russian Office of the State Herald, private

communication, 1996.

[3] Da'ud ibn Auda and Alison MacDermot, "Regional Style Heraldry in the

SCA", Known World Heraldic Symposium Proceedings, 1993 (SCA Inc.).

[4] Paul Wickenden of Thanet, private correspondance, November 1997.