A rose by any other name—preferably rosa eglanteria—smelled not merely as sweet, but sweeter, in the cultured nostril of the Renaissance. Throughout Europe personal names customarily appeared in print in forms far removed from the simple vernacular bestowed at baptism. In examining twenty-odd thousand volumes while indexing dedications and other preliminaries in British books printed before 1641, the writer has encountered hundreds of instances. A survey of this material, organized to illustrate the various types of masquerade that writers assumed, may assist other students of Renaissance literature. The droller examples may even amuse. My final section, after noting various types of mystifications and puzzles, will leave the reader with a group of unsolved signatures on which he is invited to exercise his ingenuity. The examples throughout the article are drawn from books printed in the British Isles before 1675, except for a few from British authors published on the Continent. No excursion has been made into the rich field of Latin legal documents, though I must acknowledge aid from such standard keys to that material as Charles T. Martin's Record Interpreter.