Christian girls’ names
Names carried through the Christian tradition — biblical, saints' names, and the long European inheritance built on Hebrew, Greek and Latin roots.
Christian naming has three layers, laid down in three distinct periods, and most European girls' names belong to one of them.
The first is scriptural, and it is largely Hebrew and Greek rather than Latin: Mary, Elizabeth, Anna, Martha, Magdalene, Priscilla, Lydia, Tabitha. Hannah, discussed on the Atlas grace page, became Anna in Greek and then Anne, Ana, Anya, Áine and several dozen more across Europe — probably the single most successful name in history.
The second is the saints, which is where the Latin and Germanic names enter. Medieval naming in much of Europe was effectively a closed set drawn from the local calendar of saints, and this is why a handful of names — Mary, Catherine, Margaret, Joan — account for such an enormous share of recorded women in some periods.
The third is the Reformation, which broke that pattern in two different directions. Protestant England took up Old Testament names that had been little used, and then the Puritans went further and coined virtue names outright: Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, Patience, Mercy, Grace. Those are sixteenth and seventeenth century inventions, not classical inheritances, and they are discussed on the Atlas faith page.
Catholic Europe went the other way, toward Marian titles. This produces a group of Spanish names that look like place names because they are: Lourdes, Guadalupe, Fatima, Pilar, Montserrat, Carmen — each a shrine or apparition rather than a word meaning anything about the bearer. Carmen in particular is regularly misread as the Latin for song; it is not.