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Studies in anthropological onomastics generally take names as a guide to understanding social and cultural practices in a given community. The specific status of women in the Early Middle Ages suggests that their names might help us to understand their status. The sparse nature of the documentation does not make this easy. Nevertheless, by considering names, it is possible to analyse the role of women in kinship patterns: indeed, they had much more difficulties than men to transmit their names to their descendants and also to transmit the names of their forebears, except in cases of hypogamy. It would however be rash to assume the existence of radical differences betwen the names of men and women, and equally risky to attach gendered meaning to names.