Granting Access: Revealing Women's Networks through Miraculous Healing

For a successful fourteenth-century canonization inquest, two types of access were crucial. Sufferers needed access to God's grace through the holy person to effect a miraculous healing and inquest organizers and papal commissioners needed access to the stories of these sufferers. In other words, for new official saints to be produced there had to be miracles as evidence of sanctity and a way to gather that evidence. While these two types of access may seem quite different, both had the ability to reveal women's networks in the broad community surrounding a holy person.

This paper explores a case study of a woman who provided both types of access in the 1363 canonization inquest of Countess Delphine de Puimichel. Bertranda Bartholomea had been Delphine's maid for over forty years, had traveled with Delphine extensively, and was one of the only witnesses old enough to testify to Delphine's life in the court of Naples. Bertranda's testimony reveals that she both helped sufferers to access Delphine and listened as sufferers told her their stories of miraculous healing. By doing so, Bertranda bridged social groups. She primarily helped lower status women gain access to Delphine's presence, while higher status women told her stories of miraculous healing that had taken place in private meetings with the holy countess. Bertranda then testified to both kinds of miracle stories, providing evidence that inquest organizers could have uncovered in no other way.