Matronage or Patronage? The Case of Osbern Bokenham’s Women Patrons

In his innovative all-female legendary, the fifteenth-century Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham names no fewer than six women friends from the local East Anglian gen try and nobility.1 Two are explicitly said each to have commissioned one of the thir teen lives narrated in the legendary, and it is fair to assume that the others either commissioned lives of their patron saints or were rewarded with them in return for donations of land or money to Clare Priory, the well-connected establishment where Bokenham spent most of his life.2