MONTREAL/December 14, 2004—
On Thursday, December 16, at 5 p.m., a book launch will be held at the
McGill Bookstore (3420 McTavish) for Mary's Mother: Saint Anne in Late
Medieval Europe (Penn State Press -0-271-02466-6), by Virginia Nixon, an
art historian who teaches at the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University.
Today many people know Saint Anne as the mother of the Blessed Virgin and
the protector of women in labor, but few know how she came to be a figure of
devotion.
This book shows how late 15th century artists and writers depicted Anne, and
about how these texts and art works were used. It also tells about the
people who orchestrated her cult, and about how and why they succeeded in
making her one of the most popular saints in Europe in the years just prior
to the Reformation.
Saint Anne is not in the Bible. First appearing in a second-century
apocryphal gospel, her story circulated in early accounts of Jesus' birth
and ancestry, but it was only in the later Middle-Ages that devotion to her
gained a firm footing in Europe. Anne achieved her most spectacular
popularity in Germany, Flanders and Holland, where artists delighted in
showing her as a powerful woman presiding over Mary and Jesus who both
appear as children.
Clerics promoted Saint Anne as having power to help in salvation, a matter
of urgent concern to late medieval German Christians. Churches and convents
(and rulers too) adopted her as a fund-raising device in an increasingly
competitive ecclesiastical landscape. Churches, shrines, and altars were
dedicated to her, lay brotherhoods adopted her as their patroness, and
families named their daughters for her.
Anne's clerical promoters frequently used her as a model of sober
domesticity for women, part of a broader attempt to channel the growing lay
piety that the clergy perceived as a potential threat to their own power and
incomes. And yet, as a gender model, she embodied conflicts between medieval
and early modern ideas about sanctity and sexuality.
Devotion to Anne gradually declined in the 1500s as medieval modes of
religious practice and ideas about women's place in family life began to
change. Mary's Mother brings her story to life for general readers as well
as scholars and students of history, art history, religious studies, and
women's studies.
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