ABSTRACT
St Anne, the legendary mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is an apocryphal construct, the Virgin’s mother and father being without mention in the synoptic Gospels or the Gospel of St John. She makes her first appearance in the Protoevangelium of St James (c. 150), which was written in Greek. The Latin redaction of this is the version that became known as the Pseudo-Matthew, on which many later writings were based.1 By the end of the thirteenth century and until well into the sixteenth, many vernacular poems of celebration and supplication to Christ’s grandmother were being composed in England, mostly of unknown authorship.2 The best-known ones that can be ascribed to particular authors are those by John Audlay (writing in the 1420s), the Benedictine poet-monk John Lydgate (c. 1370c. 1450), and the Augustinian canon Osbern Bokenham (c. 1392-c. 1447), the last two being of East Anglian provenance. Their status as commissioned authors on this subject is surely an indicator of the regional importance of the cult of St Anne. Indeed, Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen and the thirteenth-century Golden Legend (Legenda aurea) of Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) arguably provided the substance of most local lay people’s knowledge of St Anne and the Holy Kin, as well as being integral to their entertainment in mystery plays, gild recitations and processions, and tableaux vivants. The pre-eminence of the cult in late medieval Norwich and across Norfolk has been established.3 Within this context it may be useful to assess the influence that such an affective devotion may have had on the suppliants and pilgrims to Walsingham Priory. An Augustinian foundation and the premier medieval English shrine honouring the Virgin and the Incarnation, Walsingham became an international center for pilgrimage that ultimately outshone in wealth and prestige the Canterbury shrine of Thomas Becket.
