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Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!
You asked for our opinion of <Jaquilene L'Renard> as an early 16th century French name. We wrote a letter just a few months ago discussing the name <Jaqueline L'Renard>; was that also you? A copy of that letter is attached.
The previous letter covers everything we have to say about your name, with one exception: The spelling <Jaquilene> is very unlikely to have been used in your period. The standard spelling of the name is <Jaqueline> or <Jacqueline>. The two vowels <e> and <i> are pronounced quite differently in French and would not have been swapped.
Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!
You asked for our opinion of <Jaqueline L'Renard> as an early 16th century name. Here is what we have found.
Your name is nearly perfect. <Jacqueline> was in use in French from the 13th century onward, and surnames derived from <Renard> were certainly in use in your period [1, 2, 3]. However, the spelling <L'Renard> is not correct. The definite article <le> only contracts to <l'> in French when the following letter is a vowel (or sometimes an 'h'). Therefore, the correct french for "the fox" is <le renard>.
By your period, the French used hereditary surnames, just as we do today. Since surnames were no longer expected to describe the people who used them, two-word names like <le renard> often collapsed to single words like <Lerenard>. We believe that this one-word form was more common in your period than the two-word form, and we recommend that you use it and call yourself <Jaqueline Lerenard>.
For your information: The modern surname <Renard> is much more common than <Lerenard>. The shorter form derives from the medieval given name <Renard> or <Reynart>, originally having been borne by a child of a man named <Renard>. The descriptive form, meaning "the fox", did exist in medieval France -- we have found examples in the 13th and 14th centuries [3] -- but it was not particularly common. If you'd like your name to be more typical of 16th century French usage, you might prefer to call yourself <Jaqueline Renard>.
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. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Blaise de Cormeilles and Talan Gwynek.
For the Academy,
Arval Benicoeur
References
[1] 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).
[2] Dauzat, Albert, _Dictionnaire Etymologique des Noms de Famille et
Prenoms de France_ (Paris: Libraire Larousse, 1987).
[3] Morlet, Marie-Therese, _Dictionnaire E/tymologique des Noms de
Famille_ (Librairie Académique Perrin, 1997)