I was reading through some articles on Wikipedia and long story short I ended up reading about 11th century dukes of France. I noticed that a lot of their wives had names such as, e.g. Adelaide of Aquitaine, in which Aquitaine is the duchy their father is from, and not their husband. That's fine I guess but wouldn't it have been confusing? If you told someone that a woman was Emma of Blois, how would they know who her husband was and what duchy she is a duchess of now that she's married. I know that nowadays a woman is her own person independent of her husband but back then that really wasn't the case, and I just found it really strange.
Tl:dr- Were women really named after their fathers, even in marriage, or were they named after their husbands and are now being "re-named" by historians?
That's fine I guess but wouldn't it have been confusing?
Surely it would only have been confusing if people alternated between "x of [parent's]" and "x of [husband's]". In practice, the it is usually the former.Were women really named after their fathers, even in marriage, or were they named after their husbands
Neither. Adelaide of Aquitaine's true name was just Adelaide (subject to spelling differences). Chroniclers added d'Aquitaine based on her presumed birthplace in order to distinguish her from all the other Adelaides. In life she would have been called Queen of the Franks.