Given how preoccupied historians of modern east central Europe seem to be with issues of identity, there are surprisingly few accessible monographs dedicated to the study of names and changing naming practices in the region. Scholarship in this field has been hampered by partisanship, pedantry, and amateurism; but Ágoston Berecz's excellent book takes a step towards remedying this deficiency, and sets new standards for its study. Berecz's focus is on personal names, family names, and place names in the regions historically known as Transylvania, Banat, Partium, and Máramaros/Maramureş, and on the period from 1867 to 1918, when all these territories were an integral part of Hungary. However, his account also pays attention to the preceding period, and some reference is made to the period after 1918 when these lands became part of Romania. Romanian, Hungarian, and German names are discussed, and attention is given to the background role of Latin, not just as a posited “origin” for Romanian names but as a language of administration and culture in old Hungary. These categories are analyzed across three sections, “Peasants,” “Nationalisms,” and “The State.” The first is dedicated to reviewing the threshold situation, and seeks to recover traditional naming practices “from below.” The second analyzes the impact of elite nationalizing discourses and practices. The third assesses the role of state institutions across a range of levels, from ministerial policy to its enactment on the ground through the interventions of functionaries, mayors and village elders, schoolteachers, priests, railway officials, and other relevant actors. Data is drawn from records of gymnasium and university students, and selected digitized parish registers; but also contextualized against more discursive sources such as periodicals, history-writing, and popular fiction. The whole is presented in relation to linguistic and anthropological scholarship on names, and to comparative historical research not just regionally but globally.

Berecz proves to be an erudite and sure-footed guide to a complex and hard-to-interpret body of data. His more statistical conclusions—the book contains a large number of figures and tables—are complemented by circumstantial or narrative evidence. Berecz is alive both to differences in social gradation but also to the many local exceptions to the general archetype of Hungarian elites, Saxon burghers, and Romanian peasants in the region—we also meet Poles in the north, Serbs in the west, and several other ethnicities, while local social and economic peculiarities are expertly explained. The issue inevitably involves many intricacies and caveats, but, for scholars prepared to follow it, the story of naming provides an insightful way in to a better understanding of broader social, cultural, and administrative practices in this important period of the emergence of national movements, and Berecz tells the stories well. Inevitably there are significant data gaps, especially regarding peasant practices: where Berecz uses enrolment lists at gymnasia, representative of only a small stratum of the (mainly male) elites of the peasantry, the conclusions cannot be definitive. But this is acknowledged upfront.

Berecz also offers a partially revisionist critique of the theses, currently very widespread in English-language scholarship, of “national indifference” among ordinary subjects at the end of the nineteenth-century. While he shows how “nationalist” naming proliferated in the late nineteenth century, due either to Hungarian legislators or to intellectuals and activists reacting to policy, he makes a good case for the presence of underlying ethnic loyalties on which these nationalizing practices were built. So naming did not “invent” national identities, rather it historicized and narrativized them as part of a broader social mobilization. Of course there could be other stories here besides the national one. Berecz indicates numerous areas that he could not study in detail here, one example of which is zoomorphic onomastics (people with names derived from animals). This is just one glimpse of other areas that would be relevant for reconstructing social worlds and imaginaries at intermediate and lower levels. Overall, Berecz has written a rich and fascinating work, which brings much not just to historians interested in onomastics and toponymy, but to those wanting to understand the complex social worlds behind the development of modern national identities in east central Europe in the crucial period before the First World War.