Both personal and place names in the Baltic region vary in different sources, times and linguistic contexts. National historiographies have often favoured ‘nationalised’ names, which cannot be found in the early modern sources. Moreover, the sources themselves do not suggest any uniform standards, and it was possible for people to choose the form of their names according to the context of writing (Örjan Pedersson in Swedish becomes Georgius Petri in Latin). We have chosen modern place names to help readers identify them on the modern maps of the Baltic Sea region (Turku, Vyborg, Tallinn, Tartu, Gdansk, etc.). Historically, many of the region’s towns and provinces appeared in the written sources first with their Swedish or German names, sometimes Latinised, and not with Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian ones. Personal names are mostly given in the literary (often Latin, sometimes Swedish or German) form found in the written sources (Michael Agricola, Theodoricus Rwtha, Olaus Sirma). Kings and rulers are referred to mostly in contemporary Swedish form (Gustav Vasa, Johan III, Sigismund III, Duke Karl or Karl IX, Gustav II Adolf).
Ecclesiastical and secular terminology is often as tricky an issue as the names. Clergymen were called ‘priest’ long after the Reformation, and the local languages do not make a confessional distinction even now, Finnish pappi and Swedish präst being the same for Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed or Russian Orthodox. We use the terms ‘priest’ (in general for clergymen) or clergyman, ‘vicar’ and ‘pastor’ (kyrkoherde in Swedish, kirkkoherra in Finnish), ‘dean’ (domprostor, prost in Swedish, tuomiorovasti, rovasti in Finnish) and so forth. The ‘peasants’ in the Swedish context (talonpoika in Finnish, bonde in Swedish) denote freeholding farmers, whereas the ‘peasants’ in Estonia and Livonia often had the status of serfs. ‘Noble’ does not make a distinction between various decrees of nobility, whether high aristocracy (riddare in Swedish), landed gentry or a person exempted from taxes for providing a horseman for the king’s service (frälseman in Swedish).