Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 798

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 798

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/798

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

Greetings,

Here's the information we found on the name "Kristiaen," which you wanted to use as a French name from between 1400 and 1600.

We found "Kristiaen" as a Flemish man's name. (1) Flemish is a dialect of Middle Dutch which was the main language of Flanders, a medieval country which is now part of modern Belgium. Flemish isn't closely related to French, but Flanders and France had a lot of commerce and we have examples of people named "Christiaen" who lived in France. (2) "K" and "Ch" were often interchanged in Flemish names, (1) so there's no doubt that "Kristiaen" is a historically accurate male name.

We didn't find any examples of "Kristiaen" used by women, and we don't have any reason to think that women used it. The closest women's name we found was "Christina." We did find a pair of names, the masculine "Adriaen" and the feminine "Adriana", which suggest that "Christiana" might be a correct feminine form of "Christiaen". You could spell either "Christina" or "Christiana" with a "K" if you wanted.

Arval Benicoeur, Talan Gwynek, Margaret MacDuibhsidhe, and Zenobia Naphtali contributed to this letter.

We hope this has been helpful, and that we can continue to help you.

In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel

(1) Luana de Grood, "Flemish Given Names from Bruges, 1400-1600", http://www.itd.umich.edu/~ximenez/s.gabriel/docs/bruges

(2) Colm Dubh, "An Index to the Given Names in the 1292 Census of Paris", Proceedings of the Known World Heraldic Symposium 1996 (SCA: Montgomery, Alabama).