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ursulaverdantry asked me to post about onomastic research methods, specifically in the context of raw data for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Bohemian names.(If you want to suggest a topic for me to post about in January, you can do so here.)
The first step is to find out what is already known. The Medieval Names Archive section on Czech and Slovak is pretty minimal, and there's nothing relevant in the sca.org name articles collection. You can also check old Academy of Saint Gabriel reports. I would use the advanced search tool to look for Bohemia, setting the "restriction" field to "anything" in order to turn up reports with the word "Bohemian" in them as well. There are actually quite a few hits for Bohemia. I would start with the highest-numbered reports and work backwards, checking the bibliographies to see if anything useful shows up. Indeed, there are references to two books by Ernst Schwarz whose titles start Sudetendeutsche Familiennamen and which appear to include data on Bohemian names. One of these books is available on abebooks.com for about $70 plus $10 shipping from Germany; I haven't checked Amazon or other bookfinding sites. (Both books are also in my university library, which means you could likely get someone close to you to work magic via ILL, or ask me to borrow one and let you pet it, if we're likely to be in the same place at some point.)
The other key part of finding out what's already known is to talk to experts. In this case, your likely experts are going to be Aelfwynn (who knows lots of stuff about German names, and lives in Drachenwald), and ffride (whose expertise includes working stuff out about Slavic names, and who lives in Lochac). Maybe one of them has been sitting on data that they would love to share with you! They may also know some language-specific search tricks.
What if you just want to browse around for raw data? This means you're looking for the text of medieval writing, and you want a specific type of text that will include lots of names. Exactly what such texts might be can vary from culture to culture; for Islamic cultures, for instance, the charitable donation called waqf is often a good name source. I find that "inscriptions" and "charters" are good places to start looking. For cultures that wrote in Latin, I'll also search for Latin forms of these words, such as "inscriptiones", "cartularium", "cartularia". You can also look for Latin forms of names associated with your subject. "Bohemiae", the Latin word for "of Bohemia", is likely to show up in any nineteenth-century collection of documents from medieval Bohemia, for example, and the nice thing about nineteenth-century collections is that they're out of copyright and you can often find the full text online.
When I'm doing an exploratory Google search like this, I typically dig a bit further than I might with a more ordinary question: I'll go through at least a couple of pages of regular Google search results, then switch over to books.google.com and skim through three or four pages. If I'm in the mood for a library dive, I might also try the English-language searches in Google scholar and my university's library catalogue.
For example, searching for inscriptions Bohemia on Google Books netted me a 2006 publication called Bohemian and Moravian Graduals, 1420-1620. I get this in "snippet" view, and I wasn't sure if it had the actual text of the inscriptions, so I stuck Johannes into the search box, and got some promising results.
The next search I tried was Jacobus Bohemiae, because I'd seen Jacobus in one of the collections of Czech names in the Medieval Names Archive, and it seemed likely to be common. (I often use Latin Johannes or French Jehan as a search term.) This turned up some fun stuff!
I found an OCR version of some medieval documents from Bohemia and Moravia on Gallica. I tried stripping off the end of the URL (after the last slash) to see if I could get a different version of the book, and indeed, that nets you images. If I liked this text, I'd probably re-google the title and try to find other versions of it.
Next, I found a thirteenth-century Latin letter and translation from the king and queen of the Bohemians at Epistolae. This is earlier than what we wanted, but the listed source is Codex Diplomaticus et Epistolarius Regni Bohemiae, ed. Gustavus Friederich (Prague: 1912), 2.56, ep.60. That's an old enough book that I'd hope to find other versions online, so I searched for its title. Google Books didn't give me anything with full text, but regular Google pointed me to a Czech website. I don't read Czech, but there's a big green button that has the word "text" on it and says "Elektronické" above it. (I could also make Chrome translate, but that's slower than picking up odd words!) I pressed the green button, and, success! It's a scanned edition of the book. This particular link seems to go to the thirteenth-century volume again, but the Czech page seems to link to other volumes; just look for "Tomi" with higher numbers.
I want to emphasize that you don't actually have to know an entire language to browse like this. Being able to pick out names and dates is enough to get started! However, you should be aware that names in some languages, including Latin, change form depending on their grammatical function in a sentence.
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Date: 2019-01-07 09:10 pm (UTC)