DMNES off-label use: Generating lists of names by culture

The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources (DMNES) is one of my very favorite sources for documenting SCA names, but it can be hard to navigate, and it doesn’t have an easy built-in interface for just browsing names by culture. This is unfortunate, given that one of the ways a lot of names heralds like to handle consults is to hand your submitter a list of names to see if any of them stand out.

Just because it doesn’t have an easily browsable interface, though, doesn’t mean it’s not possible to use it to generate lists of names by culture! I stumbled on this awhile back, and figured I’d write up a quick how-to.

Fundamentally, this hinges on the fact that the sources for each name in the DMNES are meticulously cited, and that citation is bidirectional: not only is there a link to the source in each individual name’s citation, but each source text has links to every single name that’s listed from that source. The trick is getting the link to each source for your target culture/language.

The steps I generally follow for this are:

1. Go to a common name that’s likely to appear in the culture you’re looking for. Saint’s names are a good bet for being found broadly across Europe, but if you happen to know a couple distinctive names for that culture, those work too.
2. Scroll down until you find the section for your target culture.
3. Click on any citation link in that section. This will take you to the specific citation for that name in its source, with an additional clickable link to the source text.
4. Click the link to the source text. This will take you to the citation details for the source text, followed by a clickable list of every name that appears in the DMNES from that text, alphabetically.

Let’s do an example. I primarily study Czech names, so let’s look for some of those. I know that the name John is likely to show up in pretty much every European culture, so we’ll start there.

From https://dmnes.org/name/John, I’ll scroll until I get to the section for the Czech Republic. It looks like the only two language options are Latin and Middle High German; we’ll start with Latin. I don’t really care what century, so I’ll take the first citation, which is for “1291 Joannes (nom) RTT-1.1 III”, and clicking the link in that item takes me to https://dmnes.org/cite/Joannes/1291/RTT-1.1. From there, the only two clickable options are to go back to the header word I just came from (John), or the source: RTT-1.1. Clicking that RTT-1.1 link takes me to https://dmnes.org/bib/RTT-1.1, which gives me the details of the source along with a nice little pile of additional names besides the Joannes that brought me here.

You can repeat this as often as you like with as many distinct sources as you can find (or until you get tired of it, or until your submitter finds something they like, etc) - just keep going back to the original name page you were browsing and click on every new source you haven’t dug into yet.

Additionally, you can use the names list on that source-text page to find more sources to dig through. This is the inverse of the process you followed to get to the source text: click on a name, and in the specific citation that pops up for it, click the header name instead of the source text. Scroll until you find the section you want, and repeat the original process.

A bonus of this method is that generally each source text covers a fairly narrow range of time - not often more than one century - so it’s helpful if your submitter is looking for something like “14th century France.” Find one name with a citation to 14th century France, and it’s likely the rest of the names from that source will be similar - but you should check the details of the source to be sure.

And that’s it! It’s honestly very simple, and I hope this gets more folks using the DMNES this way - I refer to it as an “off-label use,” since it’s not really what it’s designed for, but it works surprisingly well for SCA purposes.