The introduction provides an overview of medieval personal nomenclature and of linguistic structures. There are some 110 entries in the dictionary; besides commentaries on cultural and linguistic history, they contain representative lists of instances of the names from editions of medieval documents. The commentaries deal with etymology, the motives behind names, questions of social and cultural history, linguistic structure, diastratic aspects, the spread of the names in Romance countries, further developments in present-day Romance languages, and finally, references to the relevant secondary literature.