Saint Anne

General Information

Saint Anne is the name traditionally given to the mother of the Virgin Mary. She is not mentioned in the Bible, but her name and the legend of her life are given in the 2d-century nonbiblical Gospel of James, one of the writings of the Apocryphal New Testament. Artistic representations of Anne with Mary and the infant Jesus were popular during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. She is the patron saint of Brittany and of Quebec province. Feast day: July 26 (Western); July 25 (Eastern).

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St Anne, Matron

General Information

(Catholic Perspective)

(First Century B.C.)

Of the mother of our Lady nothing is certainly known ; even for her name and that of her husband Joachim we have to depend on the testimony of the apocryphal Protevangelium of James which, though its earliest form is very ancient, is not a trustworthy document. The story there told is that his childlessness was made a public reproach to Joachim, who retired to the desert for forty days to fast and pray to God. At the same time Anne (Hannah, which signifies "grace ") "mourned in two mornings, and lamented in two lamentations", and as she sat praying beneath a laurel bush an angel appeared and said to her, "Anne, the Lord hath heard thy prayer, and thou shalt conceive and bring forth, and thy seed shall be spoken of in all the world". And Anne replied, "As the Lord my God liveth, if I beget either male or female I will bring it as a gift to the Lord my God; and it shall minister to Him in holy things all the days of its life". Likewise an angel appeared to her husband, and in due time was born of them Mary, who was to be the mother of God. It will be noticed that this story bears a stark resemblance to that of the conception and birth of Samuel, whose mother was called Anne (1 Kings 1); the early Eastern fathers saw in this only a parallel, but it is one which suggests confusion or imitation in a way that the obvious parallel between the parents of Samuel and those of St John the Baptist does not.

The early cultus of St Anne in Constantinople is attested by the fact that in the middle of the sixth century the Emperor Justinian I dedicated a shrine to her. The devotion was probably introduced into Rome by Pope Constantine (708-715). There are two eighth-century representations of St Anne in the frescoes of S. Maria Antiqua; she is mentioned conspicuously in a list of relics belonging to S. Angelo in Pescheria, and we know that Pope St Leo III (795-816) presented a vestment to St Mary Major which was embroidered with the Annunciation and St Joachim and St Anne. The historical evidence for the presence of the relics of St Anne at Apt in Provence and at Duren in the Rheinland is altogether untrustworthy. But though there is very little to suggest any widespread cultus of the saint before the middle of the fourteenth century, this devotion a hundred years afterwards became enormously popular, and was later on acrimoniously derided by Luther. The so-called selbdritt pictures (ie. Jesus, Mary and Anne- "herself making a third") were particularly an object of attack. The first papal pronouncement on the subject, enjoining the observance of an annual feast, was addressed by Urban VI in 1382, at the request, as the pope said, of certain English petitioners, to the bishops of England alone. It is quite possible that it was occasioned by the marriage of King Richard 11 to Anne of Bohemia in that year. The feast was extended to the whole Western church in i584.

The Protevangelium of James, which appears under various names and in sundry divergent forms, may be conveniently consulted in the English translation of B. H. Cowper, Apocryphal Gospels (1874), but the text here in question is called by him "The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew"; this translation is reprinted in J. Orr's handy N. T. Apocryphal Writings (1903). The Greek text may be consulted in vol. i of Evangiles apocryphes (1911), ed. H. Hemmer and P. Lejay; see also E. Amann, Le Protevangile de Jacques et ses remaniements (1910). The most complete work dealing with St Anne and devotion to her from every point of view is that of Fr B. Kleinschmidt, Die hl. Anna (1930); but see also H. M. Bannister in the English Historical Review, 1903, pp. 107-112; H. Leclercq in DAC., t. i, cc. 2162-2174; and P. V. Charland, Ste Anne et son culte (3 vols.). M. V. Ronan, St Anne: her Cult and her Shrines (1927) is rather uncritical. The spelling "Ann" was formerly commoner in England than it is today.

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