Etymology in Tradition and in the Northern Renaissance

What Mr. Eliot has succeeded in expressing most economically-the vast importance of names-has been the object of scholarly investigation for many years. Ernst Cassirer's Sprache und Mythos: ein Beitrag zum Problem der Gotternamen describes the mythical-magical importance of names in general and of divine names in particular.2 His observations have a less speculative counterpart in Ernst Robert Curtius' Etymology as a Category of Thought, an excursus to his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.3 Curtius describes the practical rhetorical uses to which names were put, or more properly, the discipline which employed all words, names included, as the primary object of study. Cassirer explains the belief in the intrinsic connection between name and essence, a belief with great implications in magic and mysticism, and one to which we shall return below. With Cassirer's approach one may evaluate the problems of names as they appear in religion and philosophy. Curtius explains name-study in terms of etymology, the reduction of words to their original semantic elements, and surveys the sources and course of etymology from antiquity through the Middle Ages and on to Calder6n. With Curtius' approach one may evaluate the problems of names as they appear in oratory and literature. Both the problems and the approaches are rarely so simple as not to overlap substantially. One needs both Cassirer and Curtius to confront the many kinds of problems arising from names in written tradition. The considerable variety of name-studies and name-uses suggests a series of categories conforming to Cassirer's and Curtius' approaches. Names seem to have played influential and distinguishable roles in mystical, exegetical, rhetorical, and historical pursuits. The mystical and rhetorical uses of name-study are those most properly explained by Cassirer and Curtius respectively. The exegetical use falls into a category between these two. It is a rhetorical convention in the service of religious experience, in

Art · Art history · Etymology · Linguistics · Literature · The Renaissance · Classics · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Themes in Literature Analysis

• Bibliography of Personal Names, 1968

  Open Access•Elsdon C Smith•Names•1969

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• Etymology, Antiquarianism, and Unchanging Languages in Johannes Goropius Becanus's Origines Antwerpianae and William Camden's Britannia

  Open Access•David W Baker•Renaissance Quarterly•2019

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