Commentariola

The Office of St. Anne in the Carmelite Liturgy

Abstract

In the introduction to their book on the cult of St. Anne, Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn1 offer an extensive description and 
discussion of a late fifteenth-century altarpiece commissioned by a brotherhood of St. Anne for the Carmelite church in Frankfurt,  which gives a comprehensive pictorial overview of devotion to St. Anne among the Carmelites. This artistic depiction of St. Anne’s life,  including her relationship to the Carmelites, invites a further investigation of her cult and the chants which were used to celebrate her  feast in surviving Carmelite manuscripts from Mainz, Germany, and Krakow, Poland.