ABSTRACT
For centuries individuals had only one first name, but by 1900 they nearly all had two or more. How were double, multiple or “middle” names introduced, and why?
The custom probably began in Italy. Persons with two first names are found there from the late thirteenth century, if not earlier. Such double names were already common in fourteenth-century Florence. Of Gregorio Dati’s 24 children, born between 1391 and 1431, 18 had two first names. By the late fifteenth century double naming was frequent among the élites of Florence, Perugia, Venice, Rome and elsewhere, and there was a further progression of the custom in the sixteenth century. It also spread geographically and socially. Of Corsicans serving in the Genoese army in 1564, 18 per cent had double names. At the end of the sixteenth century also “two or more first names were given to all babies in the Fiesole, Chianti and Casentino regions of Tuscany, though it took a further century for the practice to reach the [more backward] Mugello”.1
