Elisabeth Okasha: Women’s Names in Old English (Studies in Early Medieval Britain)

• Jan Čermák

The principal aim of this new book by a leading expert on Anglo-Saxon medieval epigraphy is to demonstrate, using rich philological evidence, that the traditional, and absolute, reliance by scholars working in Old English onomastics on grammatical gender as the primary indicator of the sex of the referent is unfounded. Starting from this central issue, Okasha goes on to show that there is no complete gender-specificity in Old English personal names and that the meaning of Old English vocabulary items that happened to be used as personal names (or as their elements) appears to be largely irrelevant to the choice of personal name. Further, the author’s material allows her to demonstrate that certain female names cannot be seen as confined to certain periods or dialect areas of Anglo-Saxon England.