Saint Anne

According to Christian tradition, Saint Anne was the mother of Mary, the wife of Joachim and the maternal grandmother of Jesus. Mary's mother is not named in the Bible's canonical gospels. In writing, Anne's name and that of her husband Joachim come from New Testament apocrypha, of which the Gospel of James (written perhaps around 150 AD) seems to be the earliest that mentions them. The mother of Mary is mentioned but not named in the Quran.

The story is similar to that of Samuel, whose mother Hannah (Hebrew: חַנָּה‎ Ḥannāh "favour, grace"; etymologically the same name as Anne) had also been childless. The Immaculate Conception was eventually made dogma by the Catholic Church following an increased devotion to Anne in the twelfth century. Dedications to Anne in Eastern Christianity occur as early as the sixth century. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Anne and Joachim are ascribed the title Ancestors of God, and both the Nativity of Mary and the Presentation of Mary are celebrated as two of the twelve Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church. The Dormition of Anne is also a minor feast in Eastern Christianity. In Lutheran Protestantism, it is held that Martin Luther chose to enter religious life as an Augustinian friar after invoking St. Anne while endangered by lightning.

Although the canonical books of the New Testament never mention the mother of the Virgin Mary, traditions about her family, childhood, education, and eventual betrothal to Joseph developed very early in the history of the church. The oldest and most influential source for these is the apocryphal Gospel of James, first written in Koine Greek around the middle of the second century AD. In the West, the Gospel of James fell under a cloud in the fourth and fifth centuries when it was accused of "absurdities" by Jerome and condemned as untrustworthy by Pope Damasus I, Pope Innocent I, and Pope Gelasius I. However, despite having been condemned by the Church, it was taken over almost in toto by another apocryphal work, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which popularised most of its stories.

Ancient belief, attested to by a sermon of John of Damascus, was that Anne married once. The sister of Saint Anne was Sobe, mother of Elizabeth. In the fifteenth century, the Catholic cleric Johann Eck related in a sermon that St Anne's parents were named Stollanus and Emerentia. Frederick George Holweck, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) regards this genealogy as spurious.

In the 4th century and then much later in the fifteenth century, a belief arose that Mary was conceived of Anne without original sin. This belief in the Immaculate Conception states that God preserved Mary's body and soul intact and sinless from her first moment of existence, through the merits of Jesus Christ. The Immaculate Conception, often confused with the Annunciation of the Incarnation (Mary's virgin birth of Jesus), was made dogma in the Catholic church by Pope Pius IX's papal bull, Ineffabilis Deus, in 1854. The 13th century Speculum Maius of Vincent of Beauvais incorporates information regarding the life of Saint Anne from an earlier work by Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim Abbey.

In the Eastern church, the veneration of Anne herself may go back as far as c. 550, when Justinian built a church in Constantinople in her honour. The earliest pictorial sign of her veneration in the West is an eighth-century fresco in the church of Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome. The Feast of the Conception of the Virgin Mary had reached southern Italy by the ninth century. In the Latin Church St. Anne was not venerated, except, perhaps, in the south of France, before the thirteenth century. A shrine at Douai, in northern France, was one of the early centres of devotion to St. Anne in the West.

The Anna Selbdritt was a type of iconography depicting the three generations of Saint Anne, Mary, and the child Jesus. Emphasizing the humanity of Jesus, it drew on the earlier conventions of the Seat of Wisdom, and was popular in northern Germany in the 1500s. During the High Middle Ages, Saint Anne became increasingly identified as a maritime saint, protecting sailors and fisherman, and invoked against storms.

Two well-known shrines to St. Anne are that of Ste-Anne-d'Auray in Brittany, France; and that of Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré near the city of Québec. The number of visitors to the Basilica of Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré is greatest on St Anne's Feast Day, 26 July, and the Sunday before the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, 8 September. In 1892, Pope Leo XIII sent a relic of St Anne to the church.