Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.
Today’s name is a masculine name from Genoa. If you just saw the name and didn’t know the context, you’d be forgiving for assuming it was Welsh or perhaps Breton — but neither of those options would make sense for explaining a name showing up in 14th-century Italy. Do you have any alternative sugestions? Any other examples of the same name? Please share in the comments!
Advertisements
I found several persons named Cosmaele in the 14th century, most of them in or associated with Genoa; among them are Cosmaele Lomellini, Cosmaele De Mari, Cosmaele de Laurentiis, and Cosmaele Doria. The last seems to be the son of Cosmo Doria. All of this makes me think that we might be dealing with a local derivative of the name Cosmo: perhaps there was a suffix -ele in Ligurian or, more specifically, in Zeneize, its Genoese dialect. This is, of course, highly speculative: my ignorance of Italian and Ligurian dialects is vast.