Was Dame Juliana Berners Real?

It’s been a while since we touched on any real fly fishing history. But this week a reader asked whether Dame Juliana Berners — the so-called “first lady of fly fishing” — ever really existed. It got Phil Monahan in the mood to expose both Wikipedia and a long line of hearsayists for embellishing the facts.
“Good myths die hard, and despite the fact that most historians find evidence of Dame Juliana’s existence sketchy at best, many sources still treat her authorship of Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle, a 1496 addendum to the Boke of St. Albans, as fact.”