ABSTRACT
One of the results of St. Anne’s increasing popularity during the last decades of the fifteenth and early years of the sixteenth century was that her cult exploded at a point when the material focus of piety in Europe was undergoing significant shifts. The physical relics of saints had long served as holy intermediaries and sources of divine power, but the later Middle Ages witnessed two key changes. First, saints were becoming fragmented-where the earlier Middle Ages focused on entire bodies, in later centuries relics were more likely to be body parts or pieces. By the late fifteenth century, those pieces had become even smaller, and were frequently juxtaposed with other fragments, housed in reliquaries that contained bits of a multitude of saints. Second, the distinction between a physical relic (a piece of bone or an article that had been owned by or had been in contact with a saint) and an image of a saint was elided.1 Whether it contained relics or not, whether it was carved, painted, or printed, an image could be presented and understood as a source of miracles and saintly intercession.
