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Musicologist Michael Alan Anderson examines music dedicated to Saint Anne to shed light on Renaissance culture.

Why Saint Anne?

Saint Anne gets way more than her due in history because of her relationship to the Virgin Mary, who is a central figure in Christianity. As a historical figure, Mary had to have a mother, and the legend has given the name Saint Anne to her mother. And so she’s important because of her connection to the most powerful woman in Christian theology.

Her story is known to us from an apocryphal source in the second century. It’s not accepted as part of the official canon of the church, but it was widely circulated. And her legend picks up later in the Middle Ages when a lot of poetry and music and other texts were written about her. So in the book I was trying to put on the musicologist’s hat and look at all the things that had been ignored.

What has been ignored?

It wasn’t just a matter of saying prayers to Saint Anne, or regular devotion. People in the Middle Ages felt a real, visceral connection to these saints. Because Saint Anne was more or less an imagined figure, people started to think up some interesting areas of intercessions. If people wanted to pray for wealth or well-being, they’d pray to Saint Anne. She could help in childbearing or fertility. She could help widows. She didn’t really have a biography, so people thought up things for her, based on what little they knew.

The most important thing is that she was a politically advantageous saint to worship. I think people who look at the book will do a double take and say, politics? And sainthood? But Saint Anne was not only the mother of the Virgin Mary; legend says she was also mother of two other Marys, which connects Saint Anne to an impressive network of relatives, including Jesus, but also disciples and other figures. It was known as the “Holy Kinship,” a big, impressive family tree with Saint Anne at the top—and isn’t it the goal of kings and queens to produce great lineages? By worshipping Saint Anne, you’re worshipping someone who sits atop the most important family in Christianity. Rulers are emulating that, and so it would make sense for them to sponsor music, paintings, and poetry for Saint Anne.

What kind of music do you examine in the book?

I explore two kinds. One is chant, which is music for one voice or unison voice, without harmony. It was the central style of music for the entire Middle Ages and Renaissance. I’m trying to remind people with this book that chant has always been at the heart of sacred music.

The second is the glorious, elegant, beautiful choral music called polyphony. This is the most decorative style—but these pieces were exceptional. They were the best music money could buy, and no small amount of polyphony was written for Saint Anne.

There’s no zinger of a piece in the book, no musical outlier. It all fits in the music of the period. Rather, what I’ve done is to bring anonymous music to the foreground. The tendency in our field is that if we don’t know the composer’s name, then we have nothing to say about the piece. I tie pieces about Saint Anne to people who cared about Saint Anne—I don’t care if we don’t know the composer.

Is this a typical musicology project?

We’ll see. I think the field is headed in this direction. Twenty years ago, musicology was perfectly comfortable saying, here’s what happens in this piece and here’s what it’s about. It’s like art history; our fields are very close. But now we’re looking at who a piece belongs to and how it fits into something bigger. We’re asking questions not just about the object, but about how it fit into a culture or place or institution.

—Kathleen McGarvey