International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2008 Abstracts

Who was Saint Anne and why did the story of her marriages, pregnancies, and family make her the quintessential saint of the fifteenth century in France and throughout Western Europe? The mother of the mother of God, Saint Anne, her brood, and her blood, inspired not only widespread devotion and fierce debate but also a great deal of genealogical creativity.

The medieval men and women who created and embellished on Saint Anne, her lineage, and her progeny did so to provide answers to questions that mattered a great deal to them, questions the Gospels did not answer. Who was Jesus’ family? The nuclear family of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, even with God and the Holy Spirit, offered an in some ways unsatisfying picture, lacking in kin and lineage. Medieval men and women, members of extended family clans, could not abide a Jesus on his own, a Jesus born in a familial vacuum. Jesus, as they did, required kin, and medieval men and women located and cultivated his kin in ways that reflected their own needs and values, both in providing a holy kinship and in allowing aspects of human life that Mary and Jesus could not express, such as sexuality and violence, by other members of their family, namely Anne and James Major.

The goal of this paper will be to explore the holy kinship, Anne’s family circle, in light of these questions, drawing on source materials chiefly from France. Prior scholarship on Saint Anne has focused almost entirely on the Low Countries, Germany, or England. A focus on France will shed new light on French devotional practices in the later middle ages, and allow for comparison to the better-known sources.