The Cult of St. Anne in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Dr Jennifer Welsh received her M.A. in Medieval Studies from Cornell University in 2000, and her M.A. and PhD in History from Duke University in 2004 and 2009. Her dissertation dealt with the cult of St. Anne in late medieval and early modern Europe. After four years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, she started working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Lindenwood-University Belleville in Belleville, IL in August of 2014. This is her first book.

Emerging in the early centuries of Christianity, St. Anne - mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus - become an increasingly popular figure in late medieval northern Europe, standing at the centre of an elaborately-constructed extended holy family. Despite this popularity, and the ideal model of female lay piety she represented, St Anne’s absence from Scripture made her a problematic figure for Reformers. Tracing the history of the cult of St. Anne across the medieval and early modern period in German- and Dutch-speaking Europe, this book examines her shift from incredibly popular late medieval saint, to target of Protestant criticism, to reconfigured focus of post-Tridentine Catholic devotion.

Drawing upon a broad range of both textual and visual sources, Dr Welsh advances novel arguments about St. Anne’s cult from its medieval roots right through to the nineteenth century. Challenging received notions of her cult as the last gasp of medieval piety or a precursor of later trends, this study provides a new and multi-textured understanding of St. Anne in Northern Europe, which can in turn be used to explore shifting relationships between domesticity and sanctity, concepts of properly pious lay behaviour for both men and women, and attitudes toward women (particularly older women) across several centuries. Perceived in these terms, St. Anne’s cult provides an example of how important it is not only to move beyond old clichés that rigidly separate ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, but also to look past traditional chronological boundaries in the study of medieval and early modern Europe.