According to Roman Catholic traditions, the mother of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ.
St Anne became a "necessity" when the cult of Mary gained popularity in the Medieval church, on the rationale that if the mother of our Saviour was needed to intercede on one's behalf to Christ, she in turn needed to be approached via someone who could intercede on one's behalf to Mary, and who else better than her mother? The name Anne has no biblical basis and seemed to have been adopted from an 1st Cent apocryphal work for this illustrous lady.
St Anne was the patron saint of miners, and is famously the saint to whom Martin Luther made a vow during a severe thunderstorm that if she should save him he would become a monk.
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