Yesterday I spent a good deal of time perusing lists of names of Guild members in 16th century Bruges. It’s one of the many wonders of the Internet that you can find this sort of thing for the asking… and, as I said, I ended up spending a good chunk of the afternoon going through list after list, copying the promising ones in my notebook – one column for given names, one for family names – trying them out for size, and even involving a Dutch-speaking friend for a sense of how a few of them would be pronounced… Continue reading →