Laudator Temporis Acti

J. Huizinga (1872-1945), The Waning of the Middle Ages, tr. F. Hopman (1924; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 218:

Of the same nature is the custom, very ancient and very primitive, of giving a proper name to inanimate objects. We witnessed a revival of this usage when the big guns during the recent war got names. During the Middle Ages it was much more frequent. Like the swords of the heroes in the chansons de geste, the stone mortars in the wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had names of their own : 'Le Chien d'Orléans, la Gringade, la Bourgeoise, Dulle Griete.' A few very celebrated diamonds are still known by proper names: this, too, is a survival of a widely spread custom. Several jewels of Charles the Bold had their names: 'le sancy, les trois frères, la hôte, la balle de Flandres.' If, at the present time, ships still have names, but bells and most houses have not, the reason lies in the fact that the ship preserves a sort of personality, also expressed in the English usage of making ships feminine. In the Middle Ages this tendency to personify things was much stronger; every house and every bell had its name.