Personal Names
There was no standardised spelling in the seventeenth century and certainly no one way to write personal names. The secretaries and notaries who wrote the vast majority of the documents examined here tended to ‘translate’ foreign names of both people and ships into Tuscan. Thomas Smith, for instance, becomes ‘Tommaso Smit’, while the ship Alice and Francis becomes Alice Francesca. Often the original can be guessed fairly securely, but not always. Giacomo Ardisson could plausibly have been translated from ‘James Addison’ or similar, but the source in fact records him as Genoese.
I have therefore stuck with the name given by the sources throughout, though I have made an exception for a single case – that of the aforementioned Alice and Francis – which is examined in considerable detail. Here, the ship’s real name can be securely ascertained from various English sources. Where spelling varies, I use a single name for a single person: the variation is never so great that individual actors cannot be securely identified. I have opted for the version which appears most often in the sources or, failing that, the version which appears first in the plaintiff’s libel, the testimoniale e domanda.