ABSTRACT
The closing words of The Book of St Albans, a compendium of three texts on hunting, hawking and heraldry printed in 1486, attribute one, The Boke of Hunting, to ‘Dam Julyans Barnes’. There has been much discussion of the identity of this woman, now conventionally known as Dame Juliana Berners. According to the antiquary John Bale, writing in 1549, she had been alive in 1460, while William Burton (1575–1645), in a note that he wrote before 1612 in his copy of The Book of St Albans, now in the Cambridge University Library, identified her more precisely as ‘the Lady Julian Berners, daughter of Sir James Berners, of Berners-Roding, in Essex, Knight, and Sister to Richard Lord Berners … Lady Prioresse of Sopwell Nunnery neere St Albons’.
