The Costellos were a politically significant family in County Mayo from early in the thirteenth century through to the mid- seventeenth century. Particularly in the middle of that period, there were a large number of monastic foundations operating in Mayo. It’s more than likely that the Costello family endowed some of them, and it’s certainly not impossible that some members of the family entered the church and, with the benefit of family connections, progressed to positions of power. So there could well have been an more than one abbot from the Costello family. But I’m not aware of a specific example.
Having said that, an abbot from the Costello family would not have been “Abbott Costello”. For one thing, in the culture of the time surnames were not much, and were never used without forenames, and were never coupled with titles. Thus a John Costello who became an abbot, if he were addressed by that title, would have been called Abbott John, not Abbot Costello.
Though, in fact, he wouldn’t have been Abbot John either. “Abbot” wasn’t used as a title. John Costello might have been, e.g. the Abbot of Killala, but he would have been addressed as Father John.
(Plus, of course, throughout this time May was Irish-speaking, not English-speaking. So our hypothetical John Costello would in fact have been Eoin Mac Coisdealbha, and would be so called in modern historiography. This could be why Google searches for “Costello” and “abbey” are not turning up any results.)
OK, the original Irish spelling opens up a new line of inquiry, but a Google search for
+abbot Coisdealbha -“Abbott and Costello”
only returns a couple of pages of results, none of which seem relevant.
Yes, but it’s a pretty big step. A prior is basically just a monk who happens to take on some administrative duties, while an abbot has a great deal of autonomy and is nearly equivalent to a bishop. Still, this Fr. David Costello is probably the closest we’ve got so far.
If one really wanted to pursue this, one might first dig up a list of Irish abbeys, and then try to find records of the abbots for each of them. But that’s a lot more work than I’m willing to go to, especially since those records won’t necessarily be online.
Well, to complicate matters still further, there are variants in the spelling of the name. As well as Mac Coisdealbha you’ll find Mac Coistealbha, Mac Coistealla and no doubt others.
I don’t think Googling is going to answer this one. What you need is access to a good reference library which includes - in so far as we have them - lists of the heads of the various monastic foundations in or near County Mayo.
And I don’t know to what extent we have them. Many of these houses were suppressed by force, and their contents dispersed or destroyed; there wasn’t exactly an orderly handover of records. We mostly know about churchmen if they get mentioned in secular histories, but monks generally don’t; the whole point of monasticism is that monks withdraw from the world. Even within the monastery, the culture was very much against any focus on individuals; there are very few memorials to or tombs of identifiable abbots, for instance. We have pretty compehensive records of Irish bishops from the twelfth century onwards (There was a Bishop of Clonfert named Costello in the late eighteenth century) but our knowledge of abbots is more patchy.
On the contrary; I guarantee you that every one of those abbots was, in fact, an ape.
(In seriousness, “primate” just means “first”, in the sense of “most important”. That’s the reason for the use in church titles, and the biological order is called that because it includes us, who are obviously the most important creatures on the planet.)
“Drucker” is “printer” in German, right? So one probably could find a lot of Brother Printers at monasteries. Ironically, they probably produced about as many pages per minute as a modern Brother printer.
A dozen or so years ago, Peter Costello and Greg Abbott played up front for Bradford City F.C.
Not sure if either of them entered the church after their soccer careers were over though…
