Saint Anne

Saint Anne (also Ann or Anna) is venerated in Christian tradition as the mother of the Virgin Mary and thus the maternal grandmother of Jesus. She is not named in the canonical New Testament. The earliest connected narrative of her life appears in the second-century apocryphal Protoevangelium of James (the Infancy Gospel of James), with later expansions in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and in medieval Latin compilations such as the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. Eastern Christian liturgy and art likewise honor her, usually together with her husband Joachim. Because these sources are late, legendary, and theologically shaped rather than contemporary records, almost nothing about her can be established by critical historical method; the account that follows summarizes received hagiographical tradition, not independently verified biography. No reliable source records her year or place of birth or death.

In the Protoevangelium, Anne and Joachim are a devout couple in Judea who remain childless into old age, a condition treated as a public reproach. Joachim, after having a Temple offering refused on account of his childlessness, withdraws to the wilderness to fast. Anne, lamenting in her garden, receives an angelic promise that she will conceive; Joachim receives a parallel vision and returns. Anne then bears a daughter, Mary, whom the couple dedicate to God. At the age of three Mary is presented in the Temple and raised there. A later Western medieval development, the so-called trinubium, held that Anne married three times (to Joachim, then Cleophas, then Salomas) and bore three daughters named Mary—the Virgin, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Salome—thereby making her grandmother of several apostles. That genealogy was widely illustrated in late-medieval art as the Holy Kinship, but it was never defined as doctrine and was criticized by later theologians.

Devotion to Anne grew slowly. She is attested in Eastern liturgy and imagery from late antiquity; a church under her name existed in Jerusalem by the sixth century, and her cult was known in Constantinople. In the Latin West her feast and popular following expanded sharply from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in tandem with Marian piety and with competing relic claims, notably at Apt in Provence and later at Düren in the Rhineland. A Crusader church of Saint Anne in Jerusalem stands over a grotto associated by tradition with her house; that association, like the relic traditions, belongs to piety rather than archaeology. The Roman Church long kept her feast on 26 July; Gregory XIII extended it to the universal calendar in 1584, and since 1969 the memorial has been joined with Joachim on that date. Eastern Orthodox churches commemorate her Dormition on 25 July and, with Joachim, observe 9 September and the conception of the Theotokos on 9 December. In art she is commonly shown teaching the child Mary to read, meeting Joachim at the Golden Gate, or within the Holy Kinship.

Anne became one of the most widely invoked saints of late-medieval and early-modern Catholicism. She is principal patroness of Canada, a status tied to seventeenth-century devotion at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, and of Brittany, where Sainte-Anne-d'Auray is a major pilgrimage centre. She is also invoked by mothers, grandmothers and grandparents, by pregnant women and women in childbirth, by the childless, and by miners, cabinetmakers, housewives, lace-makers, seamstresses, carpenters and others. She was never the subject of a later-style papal canonization; her cult is of immemorial origin. No historically secure tomb can be identified.