Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 726

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 726

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/726

Some of the Academy's early reports contain errors that we haven't yet corrected. Please use it with caution.

Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked for our opinion of <Cecilia> and <Magdalena> as Italian names from the 14th century, and suggestions for last names meaning "of the forest". Here is what we have found.

We found <Cicilia> in Florentine records of the 14th or 15th century; that's the earliest example we found in Italy [1], but we think it is not unlikely that the name was used earlier.

We found an earlier example of the other name: It is recorded in Perugia as <Madolina> in 1285 [2]. It also appears in the same Florentine records, in the form <Magdalena> [1].

We found several last names you might want to use. We found them all as modern surnames, but they all derive from period usage and they are probably appropriate for your period. The surnames we found are <Bosco> (from an Italian word for "woods"), <Selva> (from another word with the same meaning), and <Foresti> [3]. In your period, these would properly be used with a preposition: <della Selva>, <del Bosco>, etc.

I hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Talan Gwynek.

For the Academy,

Arval Benicoeur


References

[1] Rhian Lyth, Italian Renaissance Women's Names (WWW: J. Mittleman, 1996).

<URL:http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/italian.html>

[2] Arval Benicoeur, "Feminine Given Names from Thirteenth Century Perugia"

(WWW: J. Mittleman, 1997).

[3] Fucilla, Joseph G., _Our Italian Surnames_ (Evanston, IL: Chandlers'

Inc., 1949).