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CHAUCER'S Canterbury Tales twice offers a verse equivalent of the so-called "St. Anne Trinity"-the familiar triadic grouping in medieval and Renaissance painting and sculpture of the Virgin Mary with her mother, Saint Anne, and her child (Anne's grandchild), Jesus. The Chaucerian passages are almost identical and make use of the same rhyme word. The first occurs in "The Man of Law's Tale," when Custance, falsely accused of murder, invokes God and the "merciful mayde, / Marie I meene, doghter to Seint Anne, / Bifore whos child angeles synge Osanne" (II.64o-42)1 The second occurs in the prologue to "The Second Nun's Tale," where the narrator invokes the Virgin Mary, asking her to be her "advocat in that heighe place / Theras withouten ende is songe 'Osanne,'/ Thow Cristes mooder, doghter deere of Anne" (VIII.68-7o). In each case, Chaucer's juxtaposition of Anne's name with Christ's and his representation of Mary in the central, double role of daughter and mother form a neat chiasmus that mirrors the iconography of the St. Anne Trinity.
Henry Ansgar Kelly has rightly termed these verses "routine uses of the name" of St. Anne.2 Chaucer, however, inserts Anne's commonly revered "name" into narrative settings that affect its meaning in divergent ways. The Virgin Mary and her mother Anne inspired a nearly universal following in the late medieval Church, but they did not mean the same thing to all of their devotees. As Kathleen Ashley has argued, "While the legend of St. Anne was widely known and her cult was popular among a wide variety of social groups (from peasants in the countryside and nuns in convents to the pious bourgeoisie and learned theologians), these facts alone do not show us how Anne functioned as a cultural symbol.... cultural symbols such as St. Anne are less a means of representing a meaning than an opportunity to perform it." 3
As I hope to show, the rhetorical contexts provided by Chaucer's two tales invest their separate invocations of the St. Anne Trinity with subtly opposed meanings that reflect creative tensions in the contemporary cults of Mary and Anne. In the performative context of "The Man of Law's Tale" the invocation triggers a set of genealogical associations that were particularly important to the Ricardian lay nobility...