Renaissance Name Generator

Renaissance names (roughly 1400 to 1600) follow a few conventions that make them instantly recognizable. In Italy, a person was identified by a saint's name plus a marker of who they belonged to: a patronymic (Donatello di Niccolò), a hometown (Leonardo da Vinci, Antonello da Messina), a family name with de' or degli (Lorenzo de' Medici, Isotta degli Atti), or a nickname that stuck, like Botticelli ("little barrel"). Honorifics went in front: Ser for a notary, Messer for a gentleman, Fra for a friar, Monna or Madonna for a married woman.

North of the Alps the same period produced Tudor and Elizabethan names (Thomas, William, Robert, Anne, Katherine, Margaret paired with English surnames like Cecil, Dudley, Walsingham and Sidney), French court names with de and du (Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay), Spanish names joined by de and y, and Flemish and German names with van, von and der. Across all of them, given names were drawn from a short list of saints and recycled through generations, which is why a Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo carries three ancestors in one name.

This list mixes real artists, humanists, merchants, condottieri, reformers and queens with period-plausible invented names for original characters, so you can populate a Florentine workshop or a Tudor court without every name being someone famous.