ABSTRACT
Sculpture and paintings depicting the mother-daughter dyad of Saint Anne and the Virgin with a book were popular in Spain, and particularly in Seville, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The iconography of the Education of the Virgin offers an alternative to the isolated preteen of the Immaculate Conception, by showing Saint Anne engaged in the domestic activity of teaching the future Mother of God. Virginia Nixon argues that the medieval cult of Saint Anne was promoted by humanists as well as by patrons, male and female, and that changes in iconography corresponds to the development of ideals of middle-class marriage and early modern ideas regarding the control of female sexuality. Sheingorn notes the presence of books in representations of the family group she terms the Saint Anne Trinity as well as the Holy Kinship and argues that these images should be considered part of the growing body of knowledge about female literacy in the Middle Ages.
