Namen und Geschichte in der Zeit der Einnamigkeit (ca. 400–1100)

Einleitung

Résumé

Introduction. – This contribution lays out the core questions that connect the following papers read at a conference in Tübingen in 2014 and briefly summarizes their main arguments. These contributions address two major problems: They offer a foundation for productively overcoming the „genealogisch-besitzgeschichtliche Methode“ (a method based on similarities of names and proximity of property for analyzing family connections) which was widely used by historians of the middle ages until the 1980s for analyzing questions of social history with the aid of personal names. The papers also show how far secondary names (of very different types) influenced the practices of naming already in the so-called single-name period.