Virginia Nixon

Mary's Mother is a work of art history which also draws extensively on documentary sources as it charts the depiction of Saint Anne—putative mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus—primarily in Germanic artworks between 1480 and 1550. Nixon traces how Anne was depicted first as an important, aristocratic female generative power—fertile but not subject to sexual passions—then as a middle-class married woman, and finally as an older saintly woman disassociated from Mary's fertility. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are much later than my normal period of study, so quite a bit of what Nixon discusses here is new to me in terms of the specifics of popular piety—I hadn't known, for instance, that St Anne was reputed to have had three daughters, all called Mary, by three different husbands, or that she supposedly had parents who delighted in the names of Emerentia and Stollanus.

Because of the book's brevity, some of the framing argument is undermined a little, and the methodology is at times a little lacking. (Either Nixon goes back over ground which isn't new to anyone who's read scholarship on medieval saints' cults produced any time in the last thirty years, or she omits some surprising things, such as a lack of in-depth consideration of contemporary Mariology, which I would have thought necessary). It would have been nice to see Anne contrasted more with other transregional saints, though that may have been difficult to accomplish in a short book with a single focus. Despite these issues, well worth a read if you're interested in the history of saints' cults or religion and gender.… (mehr)