ABSTRACT
St. Anne was created in the early centuries of Christianity to solve two important problems. First, her personal virtue and miraculous pregnancy after years of barrenness guaranteed the holy status of the Virgin Mary, rendering the latter worthy of being the mother of God. Second, St. Anne became the linchpin of Christ’s human genealogy, linking Jesus to Old Testament prophecies about the lineage of the Messiah. The medieval St. Anne also stood at the center of an elaborately constructed extended family. Known as the Holy Kinship (Heilige Sippenschaft), it surrounded St. Anne with three husbands, three daughters, and a host of saintly grandsons as part of late antique and early medieval endeavors to explain or connect problematic passages within Scripture through the use of St. Anne as a keystone (Figure I.1). During the late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century heyday of her cult, printers churned out miracle stories, vitae, broadsheets, and liturgical texts devoted to St. Anne and her extended family. St. Anne confraternities sprang up rapidly across Northern Europe; pilgrims traveled to sites such as Annaberg and Düren to view relics and celebrate St. Anne’s Day; and innumerable works of art depicted the Holy Kinship or the grouping of St. Anne with the Virgin Mary and Jesus, known as the Anna Selbdritt.2 St. Anne was credited with wide-ranging powers in her role as mother and grandmother, a role that promised protection to men and women who, like Luther, called upon her for aid in distress. As Friedel Roolfs wryly notes, she was “absolutely the saint” for Northern Europe between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries.3
