Puritan naming practices have been fascinating and weird to non-Puritans from the 1690s to today. The focus on hortatory names as the major difference in naming practice is a semi-recent (post-nineteenth century) development. Puritans saw themselves as radically engaging new naming practices-- by rejecting the system of baptismal godparentage and reclaiming the freedom to name their children meaningful, god-honoring names. Contemporaries of the Puritans also perceived a shift in naming practices-- but focused on the sudden influx of Biblical names, especially names from the Old Testament or Biblical characters who pointedly weren't canonical saints. After the early Republic, Puritans are sort of revived as semi-accurate caricatures of themselves in American literature (coughHawthornecough). It's at this point that Puritan naming practices become synonymous with hortatory names.

During the seventeenth century, Puritans and other radical Protestants coming out of the English Reformation repeatedly tried to differentiate themselves from their Anglican countrymen. They wore different fashion; rejected the entire musical tradition of high church worship; preached sermons with different rhetorical strategies urging listeners to purify themselves and separate from the world. Basically, radical Protestant culture was all above being different and about expressing religious difference at every level of one's life. In a humble, modest, self-effacing way, of course.

One way that Puritans could consolidate their religious identity was naming children. They rejected the Roman Catholic and Anglican tradition of baptismal godparentage, creating a new kind of freedom to name. In the baptismal godparentage tradition, parents honored godparents by naming the child after their godparent. Parish records in England for the time don't always record the godparent of a named child; but the normative practice was for a parent to ask a grandparent to godparent first, and then turn to aunts and uncles. Seventeenth-century English parish records overwhelmingly reflect children named for grandparents, aunts, uncles, and family friends.

By contrast, English Puritans decried godparentage and naming traditions as a popish form. It's difficult to know if they were reacting to a real, widespread practice (godparentage and naming children after grandparents and extended family members), or reacting to a largely-defunct practice (godparentage) still reflected in naming patterns (naming children after grandparents and extended family members). Whatever the case, Puritan naming practice shifted dramatically as the movement picked up speed. Firstborn children were overwhelmingly named for their parents, emphasizing Puritanism's covenant theology and its foregrounding of a highly authoritative family model. The hierarchical, authoritative structure of the nuclear family had spiritual significance, as it was both a reflection of God's relationship to the human soul, and the model for Christian community.

But, Puritan naming patterns also drew attention (as they were intended to) from non-Puritan contemporaries, because of non-kinship naming patterns. This included Biblical names-- and particularly names drawn from the Old Testament-- and those wacky hortatory names, such as Kill-sin or Fly-fornication. The former was far more prevalent than the the latter. Between 70 and 80% of Puritan children born in the colonies between 1690 and 1760 took Biblical names, while only 9-12% took hortatory names (on average). But it's worth noting that hortatory names were linked to the turn to the Old Testament, and to Puritan typology. Since Puritans constantly re-imagined themselves as linked to God's chosen people in the Old Testament as well as the New, they tried to imitate the OT rationale for naming children. For example, in the Bible Jacob is renamed by God from Jacob (usurper, he who grasps by the heel) to Israel (God contended), after wrestling with God. Wrestling Brewster's parents were trying to give him the same name-- just translated as literally as possible into English. Puritan journals like Samuel Sewall's reflect similar attempts to literally replicate naming patterns and rationales seen in the Old and New Testaments. In 1 Samuel, the ark of the Lord is captured just as the high priest Phinehas's wife gives birth. She names the child Ichabod, meaning "the glory has departed"; this example is a model for Puritan parents in Sussex, a hotbed of humility-based hortatory names like No-Merit, Sorry-for-Sin, and More-triale. Naming children hortatory names was strongly linked to the more common, and more widely noted, practice of naming them after exemplary Biblical characters.

Contemporaries of the Puritans, like their rival Anglican colonist Thomas Morton, perceive a big shift in naming patterns, but focus more on Old Testament names and draw parallels between the OT names and perceived authoritarianism, literalism, and humorlessness of those bearing the names. For example, Thomas Weld's journal records a countryman who named his dog "Moreover" as a joke, citing Luke 16:21 as a tongue-in-cheek inspiration: "Moreover the dogs came and licked his [Lazarus's] sores." This anecdote is widely repeated in England, but the English version has the Puritan namer being entirely serious and trying to over-spiritualize even his dogs by giving them names from the literal Bible.

Hortatory names burst into public perception in 1880, when Charles L. Bardsley publishes his Curiousities of Puritan Nomeclature. Bardsley's preface establishes the problem of his time: anti-Puritan American authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne have been writing characters with ridiculous names like Hate-evil or Live-well-before-thy-Lord-and-Savior. Historians of the nineteenth century are skeptical that these names even existed; Bardsley wants to prove that they did, and compiles a beautiful, hilarious, and at times outright sassy work on hortatory nomenclature. He slightly over-represents the number of Puritans who received hortatory names, but the work is still a damn fun read.

As for social stigma, it largely depended on what kind of society was imagined. There's no recorded stigma within seventeenth-century Puritan communities; other Puritans respond very positively to children named Patience, Wrestling-with-God, or some of the more florid examples. In the early nineteenth century, there's a literary revival of pro- and anti-Puritan literature, coming out of the push to create a national literature. Naturally, the more dramatic hortatory names become over-represented in popular representations of Puritans. And since a lot of that literature is still taught in the US classroom today, these names are still perceived as more common than they actually were in the seventeenth century.

Sources:

R.R. Hinman, A Catalogue of the first names of the Puritan settlers of Connecticut, from 1635 to 1665. Collected from state, town, and probate records. E. Gleason, 1846.

Gloria L. Main. "Naming Children in Early New England." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27.1 (Jul 1996), 1-21.

Daniel Scott Smith, "Continuity and Discontinuity in Puritan Naming: Massachusetts, 1711". The William and Mary Quarterly 15.1 (Jan 1994), 67-91.

John J. Waters, "Naming and Kinship in New England: Guilford Patterns and Usage, 1693-1759," New England Historical and Geneological Register CXXXVIII (1984), 161-181.

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