Osbern Bokenam
born
Oct. 6, 1393?, Old Buckenham?, Norfolk, Eng.
died c. 1447
English
poet and friar best known as the author of a
verse collection entitled Legends of Holy Women.
Little
is known of Bokenam’s life. He traveled often to
Italy, living for several years in Venice and
later making pilgrimages to Rome and other
cities. He made his home, however, in an
Augustinian convent in Suffolk. At least two
works in addition to the legends have been
attributed to Bokenam.
The work
on which his reputation stands is an
approximately 10,000-line poem written in the
Middle English Suffolk dialect. It consists of
three stanza forms—a 10-syllable rhymed couplet,
ottava rima, and a seven-line alternately rhymed
stanza—in which Bokenam relates the legends of
12 women saints (Agatha, Agnes, Anne, Cecilia,
Christina, Dorothy, Elizabeth of Hungary, Faith,
Katherine of Alexandria, Lucy, Margaret, and
Mary Magdalene) and of the 11,000 virgins of the
legend of Saint Ursula. The prologues to the
individual legends are more lively than the
legends themselves, which are closely translated
from Latin originals. The first of the legends,
of St. Margaret, was written for Bokenam’s
friend Thomas Burgh, and some of the other
legends were dedicated to noblewomen of
Bokenam’s acquaintance. The only surviving copy
of the manuscript is in the British Library.
Bokenam
was familiar with the poetry of John Lydgate and
is thought to have been inspired by Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, but his chief
source was the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) of
Jacobus de Voragine.
