Chloe Akers-Brewer (University of St Andrews, United Kingdom)
Name days occupy a peculiar hinterland between the personal and the universal. Saints’ days were known to almost all early modern Europeans: some feasts, such as that of John the Baptist on 24 June, were widely celebrated community events. Yet there was a strong personal resonance to these days, which commemorated receipt of one’s baptismal name and incorporation into the Christian community. Much neglected by scholars of ritual and the life-cycle, in the seventeenth century these personal-calendrical events were frequently celebrated in print. Many works take a playful, community approach to the celebration, bundling together groups of namesakes (a group of six pastors and professors called Johann, for instance) to whom a single festive work is addressed.
This paper draws on a largely untapped corpus of more than a thousand printed name day greetings, mostly ephemeral broadsheets or short pamphlets, which were presented to merchants, citizens, scholars, clergy, artisans and their families across Europe. It presents a trans-national survey of the works, revealing the widespread deployment of print for the celebration in the German Lands, Swiss Confederacy, Swedish Kingdom, Bohemia and beyond. It asks: how did early modern people use print to celebrate name days? How can we use celebratory devices and wordplay such as anagrams, carmina figurata and acrostics to interrogate the early modern understanding of the celebration? How did printed works figure in the midst of the celebrations? And, crucially, why were multi-recipient works so popular?