Saint Anne and the Early Modern Female Literacy

What is it about?

Saint Anne is considered the mother of Mary of Nazareth in the apocryphal tradition in Christianity and Islam. In hagiographic tradition, she became a polysemic symbol representing women’s desires for motherhood, the dynamics of dynasty and linage and women’s literacy models built upon the mother–daughter dyad. The article analyzes how in the early modern culture, the textual and visual representations of Saint Anne the Teacher alleged to be a highly imaginative hinge for women religious authors who sought to enter the forbidden sphere of theology. For that purpose, the study brings up to light the earliest female-authored biblical and apocryphal exegesis that was issued in print, namely the Valentina Pinelo's "Libro de las Alabanças y Excelencias de la Gloriosa Santa Anna" (The Book of Praises and Excellencies of the Glorious Saint Anne) (Seville, 1601). This old print has been barely known in scholarship, yet represents an outstanding example of women religious theological engagement. In particular, the article poses questions about the meaning of female sainthood and exemplarity for a construction of the authorial position and negotiation of the symbolic authority (auctoritas) that allowed Sor Pinelo to claim a Christian female intellectual genealogy.

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Photo by Manuel Torres Garcia on Unsplash

Photo by Manuel Torres Garcia on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The study contributes to the current state of knowledge on three principal levels: historiographical, archivistic and epistemological. It bridges the figure of Saint Anne and her multiple representations with the tradition of female exemplarity and sainthood, and places them in the context of the early modern female literacy dynamics. It restores an overlooked old print by an early modern Augustinian nun, Valentina Pinelo, that, according to my findings, is the earliest printed female-authored biblical and apocryphal exegesis. Finally, through an interdisciplinary analysis (literary studies, history of religion, rhetoric, visual arts analysis) of the relations between literacy–gender–sanctity, it problematizes the dominant male–female dichotomies with which many contemporary studies approach women’s early modern history: primarily the intus/foris space, and therefore the division between power and knowledge.

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