In this Lutherjahr, it is fitting to see a new book on the cult of Saint Anne, to whom the young Martin Luther famously appealed during a thunderstorm in 1505. The veneration of Anne and her extended lineage (the Holy Kinship) is sometimes understood as an exclusively late medieval phenomenon, ending rather abruptly in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Not so. Using a wide range of sources, including visual images and material culture, Jennifer Welsh traces the continuing fate of Anne’s cult among both Protestants and Catholics in German- and Dutch-speaking lands well into the nineteenth century.

Framed with a discussion of the confessional differences that have shaped modern scholarship on Anne, Welsh’s work proceeds in two large sections covering the pre-Reformation Anne (chapters 1–4) and Anne’s status from 1517 through the eighteenth century (chapters 5–7). An epilogue extends the discussion to the nineteenth century. In the book’s first half, Welsh demonstrates that the portrayal of Anne as the noble and wealthy head of an extended lineage appealed to the nobles and urban elites among whom her cult was most prominent. Welsh’s examination of relics, images, and miracle tales underscores this emphasis upon elite lineages, as men appear to have been the primary beneficiaries of Anne’s intercession in miracles that protected their kindred through the symbolic incorporation of the devotee into Anne’s extended family. Texts and images detailing the Holy Kinship presented such audiences with a relatable model for family relationships through the depiction of Mary’s sisters with their husbands and children. In the creation of new Anne-related pilgrimage sites in the early sixteenth century (Düren and Annaberg), Welsh detects a certain “blurring of ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ piety and practice” (123), although as she also acknowledges, the numerous confraternities founded in Anne’s honor were largely affairs of aristocrats and urban elites.

In her final chapters, Welsh’s careful analysis of early Protestant texts and images shows that Luther and other reformers did not immediately abandon the idea of the Holy Kinship. Still, a diminished focus on Anne did intersect with their new patriarchal model of marriage and the household. Catholics, too, were troubled by the accretions to Anne’s legend, especially the tradition of her three marriages, leading to a reconfigured portrait in the 1590s that had Anne married only one time and that gave much more prominence to her husband, Joachim. A revival of Anne’s cult following the end of the Thirty Years’ War continued this focus on Mary’s immediate nuclear family, with Anne frequently overshadowed by Jesus, Mary, and the other males in the household. Still, Anne was given an important role in educating the Virgin, an episode frequently depicted in art and household artifacts. For Catholics as for Protestants, Anne served to inculcate proper behavior in women. In contrast to the later Middle Ages, Anne’s cult was now largely a rural phenomenon, with her miracles directed toward preserving farmers and their livestock and her veneration expressed in massive pilgrimages.

In keeping with a number of recent studies, Welsh’s longue durée survey of devotion to Anne underscores the malleability of saints’ cults across time. Her inclusion of images and material culture is particularly commendable, although it is frequently marred by the poor quality of Routledge’s reproductions. The press is perhaps also to be blamed for occasional sloppiness in copyediting. (There is never a full reference to the 1730 sermon collection repeatedly cited as Gotteszell on pp. 214–15, for example.) I am less sure what to make of Welsh’s evident surprise that the authors of those same sermons “had all selected scriptural passages to frame their sermons,” instead of “using one of the many devotional texts dedicated to St. Anne” (204). Still, Welsh’s book is full of delightful tidbits, such as the fact that the most important relics of Anne were her arms, fingers, and thumbs. Her detailed investigation belies any ready assumption that humanist and Protestant critiques marked the death knell of her veneration and reveals the ever-shifting meanings of Anne for Christian audiences, meanings deeply attuned to contemporary trends and attitudes. It would make a nice addition to an undergraduate or graduate course on the transformations of worship in early modern Europe.