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The “fragile name”: onomastic, social and geographic mobility between Marches and Romagna at the beginning of the modern era. This article aims at studying the practical and ideological conditions and implications of the belated emergence of family names in a central Italian region with regards to the rest of Europe or even the Italian peninsula. This late absence of family names concerns indeed a considerable part of the Marches’ and Romagna’s population until the beginning and in certain cases even the end of the 18th century. Against this background, anthroponomy can serve as a major key to approaching what lies at the very heart of dynamics of mobility and social reproduction. Initially absent, the family name soon becomes a tool fundamental to individuals and groups from all backgrounds seeking differentiation or perpetuation. It is also revealing in terms of family conceptions, individual and collective logics which Gérard Delille’s oeuvre made us understand and further investigate in the long term through kinship phenomena. When the name turns "fragile" and the continuity of the family line is under threat, the families do not hesitate to rely on families that were stronger in terms of demography, but socially more "fragile". Thus, even though being allochthonous or less wealthy, the latter adopted and thus straightened the other family’s name up again. Women (daughters, nieces, sisters) occupy consequently a central place in these mostly asymmetric marriage alliances: It is through them that the "need for eternity" and the agnatic and patrilinear ideology of families on the verge of extinction can be fully expressed. |
