Morin

The sources do not agree on where Morin comes from, and the disagreement is worth stating plainly. One reading takes it from the Morini, the Gaulish people who held the coast of what is now Belgium, whose name means 'those of the sea' from the Proto-Celtic root mori. Another files it beside Moreau, from more, the medieval shorthand for a Moor, used of a man's dark colouring and softened here by the diminutive -in: the little dark one. In northern Italy the same spelling comes from neither, deriving instead from the Ladin word for a mill.

The name sits on the map in its own right as well: two rivers of the Marne and Seine-et-Marne are the Grand Morin and the Petit Morin, with a string of communes along them carrying it, from Jouy-sur-Morin to Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin.

Martin Morin was a printer of incunables, at work in Rouen from about 1490 to 1518. He is thought to have been born in or near Orbec around 1450 and to have died at Rouen about 1522. He did not learn the trade in Normandy: the Rouen family Lallemant sent him to the Rhine region together with Pierre Maufer, and he came back to set up as printer and bookseller in his own city.

His Breviarium Saresberiense of 1492, a breviary for Salisbury, is said to be the first recorded liturgical book printed for the English market, and he followed it that same year with a Sarum missal. The rest of the output reads like a map of the dioceses that bought from him: a breviary for Le Mans, missals for Tours and Rouen, for Sées in 1496, Evreux in 1497, Avranches in 1505, Amiens and Noyon in 1506.

He printed the law as well as the liturgy. The Coutumes de Normandie came off his press around 1497 or 1498, bound up with the forms used in conducting a case in the duchy, and so did the schoolroom and the bookstall: Donatus's Ars minor in 1510, Alain Chartier's La belle dame sans merci. The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue lists thirty-four of his works, and Édouard Frère's Manuel du bibliographe normand records others.

Jean-Baptiste Morin de Villefranche (1583-1656) was a physician and mathematician, appointed to Du Hamel's chair of mathematics at the Collège Royal on 3 August 1629; the institution became the Collège de France in 1870. He taught nothing officially on the subject that occupied him most. Judicial astrology, the predictive part, had been forbidden by the popes in 1586 and again in 1631, and only natural astrology remained licit, published mostly in the almanacs.

So he argued in print instead. His Solutio of 1631 offered the long-wanted answer to whether the earth moves or stands still, and his Responsio of 1634, addressed to Cardinal Richelieu, replied to Jacob Lansberge's defence of its motion. In 1650 and 1651 he took on Pierre Gassendi over atoms and the void.

His great work was posthumous. The Astrologia Gallica ran to twenty-six books in one folio of 784 pages, printed at The Hague by Adriaan Vlacq in 1661. Bound into it was Ma vie devant les astres, his own life set out against thirty-nine charts he had drawn himself.

The register of the name shows what a common surname does to a clerk. It carries at least five men called Jean-Baptiste Morin: the mathematician of Villefranche, a composer (1677-1745), an officer (1776-1814), a Canadian politician (1840-1911) and a French one (1851-1919).

The fix was a second qualifier, usually a place: Morin de Villefranche, Morin de Saint-Victor, Morin de La Sorinière, Morin de La Beauluère. A list invites the opposite conclusion to the one that is safe: two Morins in a register are not kin unless the record says so. Louis-Julien Morin de la Beauluère (1798-1861) and Louis Morin de La Beauluère (1854-1910) are both entered as French historians, and nothing more.

Marie Morin was born at Quebec City on 19 March 1649, daughter of Noël Morin, seigneur of Saint-Luc, and Hélène Desportes, and educated by the Ursulines there. At eleven she decided to join the Religious Hospitallers of Ville-Marie at Montreal. Her parents wanted a community nearer home and refused; two years later she entered as a novice, and took her vows in 1671. She was the first Canadian-born woman to become a nun, her brother Germain the first Canadian-born priest.

The Hospitallers put her head for business to use, naming her depositary, the financial director of the house, several times over. She directed the enlargement of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal in 1689 and its rebuilding after the fire of 1695, and in 1693 she became its first Canadian-born superior, serving until 1698 and again from 1708 to 1711.

From 1697 to 1725 she wrote the annals chronicling the Hôtel-Dieu's own history, still at it in her seventies. The name she carried had crossed with the founding settlers of New France and is now among the commonest in Quebec, which is why the map there repeats it: Morin-Heights and Val-Morin in the Laurentians, Morinville in Alberta.

Germain Morin (1861-1946) was born at Caen in Normandy and entered the Benedictine abbey of Maredsous in Belgium in 1882, ordained four years later. He had joined the Revue bénédictine in 1884, and after an unhappy year as prefect of the college at Maredsous he gave himself to research instead.

From 1887 he worked through the libraries and archives of Europe hunting what the printed editions had missed, and he kept finding it: unedited sermons and texts of Caesarius of Arles, of Jerome, of Augustine. In 1912 Pius X exclaustrated him, releasing him from the cloister so the work could go better. Maredsous was his base until 1907, then St Boniface in Munich, and Fribourg at the last.

The editions still carry his name. The Augustine sermons recovered after the Maurists' edition appeared in 1930, and the sermons of Caesarius of Arles, the project of his life, in two volumes of the Corpus Christianorum between 1937 and 1942. Oxford gave him an honorary degree in 1905, Zurich in 1919.

The name kept turning up wherever records were made or copied. Henri Morin (1655-1728) is entered as a French scholar and historian, André-Saturnin Morin (1807-1888) as a man of letters, philologist, jurist and administrator at once. Pierre Morin (1531-1608) was a French biblical scholar, and Jean Morin (1591-1659), who signed himself Joannes Morinus, a theologian and biblical scholar after him.

Others made pictures rather than read: Jean Morin (1590-1650), a French painter, and Jean Alexis Joseph Morin (1877-1940), who worked as Morin-Jean, an archaeologist, painter, engraver and illustrator. Gösta Morin (1900-1977) was a Swedish musicologist and librarian. The name was borrowed once, too: Winston Churchill hung his paintings at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1921 under the pen name Charles Morin.

Victor Morin invented the Morin code, a parliamentary authority used mainly in Quebec and still the procedure its assemblies run their meetings by; the Prix Victor-Morin, a theatre prize, carries the name too. Augustin-Norbert Morin (1803-1865) was a lawyer, judge and politician who served as joint Premier of the Province of Canada, and René Morin (1883-1955) headed the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation through the Second World War.

The last of the record-makers left his in a book of statistics. Joseph Pierre Marius Morin, called Pete, was raised in Lachine outside Montreal and joined the Montreal Royals of the Quebec Senior Hockey League in 1936, skating with Buddy O'Connor and Gerry Heffernan on a line known as the Razzle Dazzle. All three went up to the Canadiens for 1941-42, and in 31 games he recorded 10 goals and 12 assists. An injury ended the NHL part of it; he returned to the Royals and did not stop until 1950.