Elisabeth of Spalbeek (fl. 1246–1304) was one of the mulieres religiosae who flourished in the Low Countries during the thirteenth century.Footnote ¹ Although she is known today almost exclusively for her stigmata and her performance of Christ's Passion, I will argue that she provides an exceptional example of the spiritual networking described by scholars such as John Coakley and Anneke Mulder-Bakker.Footnote ² As they have shown, medieval holy women—recluses and anchoresses included—functioned only within tightly woven spiritual networks that connected other mulieres religiosae, sympathetic clerics, and powerful nobles who provided economic and political support in return for the women's prayers and spiritual authority. No one has analyzed Elisabeth's network in this light in part because the chief source for her life—the text written by Abbot Philip of Clairvaux, who visited Elisabeth in 1266/7—omits the proper names of most people surrounding Elisabeth and fails to mention many of the people with whom she must have come in contact.Footnote ³ In addition, major documents concerning Elisabeth have, until now, escaped any collective analysis, so we have been unable to place Elisabeth in any context. Through a painstaking review of all the pertinent documents, however, I have succeeded in uncovering Elisabeth's political and spiritual alliances, allowing me to study her in her milieu and to provide a detailed analysis of her possible secular and religious influence. I argue that she was actively engaged in building and extending her own network, and in my consideration of the evidence for this “politics of mysticism,” I offer a perspective on Elisabeth that has led me to reinterpret her role in the last recorded event of her life, the French court battle between Queen Marie of Brabant and the chamberlain Pierre de la Broce.

Elisabeth offers a unique case because the heterogeneous sources we have present her at different periods in her life and from very different angles. For Philip, the young Elisabeth is a spectacle—a mesmerizing performer and a powerful sign of God's grace, enabling the Cistercians to challenge the Franciscans on their own ground. The second text—a relic inventory by William of Ryckel, the abbot of Sint-Truiden (Saint Trond)—presents us with a more “normalized” view of Elisabeth. Like other devout persons of means, she participates in relic exchanges as both giver and recipient, with the added benefit that, because of her divine charism, she could authenticate the relics as well. Finally, there are several French court documents that show how powerful men might attempt to manipulate a well-known mulier religiosa for their own ends—although in this case I believe they failed. Unlike other holy women whose reputation was based in part on their prophetic gifts, we see Elisabeth in this instance resolutely refusing the prophetic role that others attempted to thrust upon her.

Elisabeth's practice was not itself wholly unique. Topoi from the vitae of other holy women clearly influenced Elisabeth's spiritual practice, which consisted of two primary elements: performance and divine inspiration.Footnote ⁴ Elisabeth's unusual ability to contribute to this tradition was largely due to her awareness of the political networks in which she operated. While she borrowed religious materials from the lives of others, her familial affiliations supplied her with religious networks involving the circulation of holy people and relics. Elisabeth's relative William of Ryckel, the abbot of Sint-Truiden, supplied her with an expanding network of religious clients whose support Elisabeth might gain for spiritual favors such as prayers or the gift of an authenticated relic. My analysis of the primary documents demonstrates that Elisabeth's religious practice was political in the sense that she organized her adapted spiritual exercises into a system of circulation and exchange whereby her divine authority provided people such as Philip and perhaps Marie of Brabant with a valuable service for which Elisabeth in turn received support.

I. Family Politics

Born into a noble family, Elisabeth began her career with connections through her relative William of RyckelFootnote ⁵ to such powerful men as William II of Holland, Henry III of Brabant, and Henry of Guelders, all three of whom were cousins, as the genealogical chart demonstrates (see Fig. 1). William of Ryckel was secretary and chaplain to William II of Holland,Footnote ⁶ who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1247 with the aid of his two first cousins: Henry, the future Duke Henry III of Brabant,Footnote ⁷ and Henry of Guelders, the younger brother of the duke of Guelders. William II repaid this service by having his cousin Henry of Guelders elected prince-bishop of Liège in 1247 and his chaplain William of Ryckel appointed abbot of Sint-Truiden in 1249.Footnote ⁸ William of Ryckel remained a close ally of all three men until their respective deaths, and Elisabeth's political and religious associations stem primarily from him.Footnote ⁹

Once all of these men were in power, William of Ryckel was an ally and occasional arbitrator for Henry of Guelders, while William of Holland and Henry of Guelders remained mutual supporters in all things martial and civil. Although Henry of Guelders was generally disliked as prince-bishop,Footnote ¹⁰ close ties to him did not hurt Abbot William, who was by all accounts a good abbot and restored the finances and reputation of his abbey. However, his election was somewhat atypical; he took the habit, professed his vows the very next day, and was elected abbot within the week.Footnote ¹¹ There was apparently some concern over the election, and on May 4, 1249, a bull from Innocent IVFootnote ¹² to Henry of Guelders confirmed the election of William of Ryckel to the abbacy of Sint-Truiden, a confirmation perhaps sent at the request of William of Holland.Footnote ¹³ Although such connections were politically advantageous for William of Ryckel, the connection to Henry of Guelders, at least, was not beneficial to his religious standing. In particular, Henry was not necessarily known as a friend of beguines, perhaps most famously causing the flight of Juliana of Mont-Cornillon.Footnote ¹⁴ William, on the other hand, founded the beguinage of Saint Agnes at Sint-Truiden in 1258, and on November 27, 1267, Clement IV wrote the privilege for Saint Agnes, a document that demonstrates both William's ability to gain protection for unaffiliated laywomen in the area and his real interest in supporting them.Footnote ¹⁵ His support of Elisabeth, who was actually a relative of his, was thus by no means out of character, although the same is not necessarily true of Henry of Guelders's apparent support.Footnote ¹⁶ Philip's comment that “the care of this same virgin had been commended by the bishop of the place … to the abbot of Sint-Truiden of the Order of Saint Benedict, her neighbor and relative”Footnote ¹⁷ is most likely evidence of the alliance between William of Ryckel and Henry of Guelders. The partnership was extremely beneficial to Elisabeth, who, unlike Juliana, was freely allowed to follow her spiritual practice.

With such support, there were apparently no immediate external obstacles for Elisabeth to struggle against—no forced marriage, no embarrassed friends or family, and no suspicious local clergy. While this cannot be confirmed, Philip's text does not recount any of these difficulties although they were well-known hagiographic topoi. One of the few obstacles Elisabeth did face was her complete lack of physical strength and mobility. William of Ryckel may have provided her with excellent connections, but she was an invalid, and according to the report of Philip of Clairvaux, it was well-known locally that even when her house caught fire she had been unable to leave without help.Footnote ¹⁸ Only the divine possession she experienced during her Passion performances could give her the physical strength she otherwise lacked and provide her with the ability to fulfill the rigorous demands of her religious practice. This strength was not, of course, her own, but was the power of the divine working through her. When the possession reached a high point—usually the end of a “scene” in her performance—Elisabeth would become fully entranced. Philip's preferred term by far is raptus; as Barbara Newman explains, “raptus, from rapere ‘to snatch or seize,’ in legal Latin denotes a range of crimes including robbery, seizure, abduction, and especially rape. Its only positive meaning is the mystical sense of ‘rapture’ or ‘ravishing.’”Footnote ¹⁹ In these moments, when Elisabeth was snatched up and ravished by God, the same awesome power that moved her during her performance held her completely immobile and made her impervious to outside stimuli. When dispossessed after her performance, however, she once more collapsed into extreme frailty. Thus, while divine possession granted her the strength for her spiritual exercises, it did not provide her with true physical mobility.

Fig. 1. For genealogical sources, see “Genealogia Ducum Brabantiae Heredum Franciae,” MGH SS XXV: 390–392; “Gesta Abbatum Trudonensium: Continuatio Tertia II,” MGH SS X: 392.

The vitae of the women who seem to have influenced Elisabeth offered numerous examples of spiritual community, which could be created through personal friendships—such as the one between Juliana of Mont-Cornillon and Eve of Saint MartinFootnote ²⁰—or through the circulation of people on pilgrimage to see living saints, sacred places, and relics. Elisabeth, who was unable to travel, needed a method that would allow her to become part of a similar religious network without leaving her house. Her spiritual practice began to affiliate her with the mulieres religiosae as the report of her stigmata and Passion performances spread, and on account of this fame she herself eventually became a site of pilgrimage. However, Elisabeth also used her visitors to enable her own active participation in the constant flow of religious patronage created by the circulation of religious people and sacred objects.

Mulieres religiosae such as Marie d'Oignies, Juliana of Mont-Cornillon, Christina Mirabilis of Sint-Truiden, Hadewijch,Footnote ²¹ and Beatrice of Nazareth demonstrated that women could hold positions of religious importance on account of their charismatic gifts even if the paths of preaching and clerical training were closed to them. These women—nuns and laywomen alike—often profoundly affected the beliefs of clerics who began to promote the women's spirituality and to spread the knowledge of their deeds. One of the consequences of such circulation was the network of spiritual friendshipsFootnote ²² between those male and female religious who admired or practiced extra-liturgical devotions. Elisabeth too attempted to forge religious networks that spread far beyond her own diocese of Liège, although as an invalid she spent most of her life in Spalbeek. Elisabeth probably ended her life in the nunnery at Herkenrode, though it is unknown whether she ever became a nun.Footnote ²³ While not the best remembered of the mulieres religiosae, her influence was strong enough that a local cult continued, if fitfully, after her death, eventually culminating in the seventeenth century when the Cistercian Order created her feast on October 19.Footnote ²⁴

II. The Textual Politics of Philip of Clairvaux's Hagiographic Probatio

The records of Elisabeth's life fall into three distinct categories. The first is a probatio (often mistakenly called a vita) written by Abbot Philip of Clairvaux. As the work of Dyan Elliott demonstrates, a probatio is a test, or—as in this case—the record of a test of authenticity, a test usually performed and recorded as part of an inquisitio or inquisition.Footnote ²⁵ A vita, however, is essentially a biography of a holy person, meant to serve as an exemplar and perhaps as evidence in a canonization procedure. While the last portion of Philip's document is a partial vita, the first half is essentially an eyewitness description of Elisabeth's performance that includes a record of the tests Philip performed on Elisabeth. In one scene, he saw a feather placed under Elisabeth's nose to prove that she stopped breathing during trance, thus demonstrating her authenticity and the strength of the divine power possessing her.Footnote ²⁶ An entirely different aspect of Elisabeth is visible in the second document, a list of relics written by William of Ryckel.Footnote ²⁷ This list records the exchange of relics from roughly 1270–1272. While some entries merely name the specific relic, some contain extensive information including the date, the sender, and the recipient, thus demonstrating the broad extent of the network built by William and Elisabeth. The final set of documents consists of a confusing group of texts concerning a 1276–1278 intrigue at the French court.Footnote ²⁸ These records describe extensive interviews with Elisabeth and the attempts of one court faction to manipulate her prophetic powers and use them against the queen. All three sets of documents stem from different periods in Elisabeth's life, though altogether they span only ten years. Nonetheless, they provide three very different views of her spirituality and, it seems to me, three different forms of practice that Elisabeth apparently followed over the years.

The majority of recent studies on Elisabeth analyze Philip of Clairvaux's description of her embodied spirituality, an entranced solo performance of Christ's Passion made all the more distinct by Elisabeth's possession of stigmata. This performance took place in a chapel that William of Ryckel built especially for Elisabeth. The renovated chapel, complete with frescoes dating from between 1350 and 1500, still stands, and Walter Simons and Joanna Ziegler have written an excellent overview of its history.Footnote ²⁹ The essay by Susan Rodgers and Joanna Ziegler, “Elisabeth of Spalbeek's Trance Dance of Faith,” is perhaps the most thorough analysis of Elisabeth's performance to date and stems from the dual perspectives of anthropology and art history.Footnote ³⁰ Walter Simons's article “Reading a Saint's Body” also provides an excellent discussion of her embodied performance,Footnote ³¹ but it is intriguing to note that no analysis to date has made full use of performance theory. Several essays focus on the Middle English version of Elisabeth's probatio in MS Douce 114,Footnote ³² but these essays tend to examine solely Philip's description and to ignore issues of translation and altered cultural context.Footnote ³³ However, Jennifer Brown's work on MS Douce 114 may help alter this trend.Footnote ³⁴ Scholarly interest in the performance aspect of Elisabeth's spirituality is understandable, given the striking nature of Elisabeth's Passion reenactment and the presence of stigmata in a woman a mere forty years after the death of Saint Francis.Footnote ³⁵ Nonetheless, recent enthusiasm for the analysis of women's embodied spirituality and the performative aspects of devotion has obscured the broader context of Elisabeth's religious practice.

Although half of Philip's text describes Elisabeth's performance, much of it discusses other aspects of her spirituality—such as extreme asceticism and various forms of miraculous knowledge—and Philip spends very little time discussing the stigmata for which Elisabeth has become so famous. She was apparently known for her stigmata during her lifetime, but only one other contemporaneous source mentions them, and its tone is negative. Six years after Philip visited Elisabeth, Gilbert of Tournai complained about her in his Collectio de Scandalis Ecclesiae, which he wrote in 1273 for the second council of Lyon. The Franciscan scholar was asking for reform, and he finished his list of concerns with a discussion of the beguines. He closed his discussion with the objection that “among the silly women of this kind is one who is publicly rumored to bear the stigmata of Christ. If this is true, let it not lurk in hiding-places but be known more openly. But if it is not so, let hypocrisy and pretense be put to shame.”Footnote ³⁶ Gilbert does not mention Elisabeth by name, but given the year and geographical location, she is by far the most likely object of his anxiety and therefore the most probable object of his apparent request for an investigation. As a Franciscan, Gilbert was presumably interested in maintaining the unique status of Saint Francis's stigmata,Footnote ³⁷ and his politically oriented stance may have been further motivated by the knowledge that the reform agenda of the council would extend to the mendicant orders. Without this incentive, it is unlikely he would have singled out Elisabeth from the other beguines for special consideration. His attention demonstrates Elisabeth's continuing fame well after Philip's visit, but even though Elisabeth's performance and stigmata were the most notable—or noticeable—features of her cult, they were not the sole defining feature.

Elisabeth's Life. According to Philip, Elisabeth began her career with “the continued punishment of the divine scourge and the mortification of her own flesh” at the age of five.Footnote ³⁸ Within roughly ten years, she probably began performing the Passion and was granted the stigmata, for sometime before Philip arrived,Footnote ³⁹ William of Ryckel built her a chapel with an adjoining room that quite literally became the stage for her performances of Christ's Passion.Footnote ⁴⁰ Elisabeth was never enclosed as an anchoress, so it is most likely that the room and chapel were built to house her performances and the growing number of spectators. Her ensuing state of semi-enclosure promoted Elisabeth's status as a holy woman, and people came to see her perform and to ask her advice just as they approached other holy women, such as Marie d'Oignies and Juliana of Mont-Cornillon, for spiritual guidance. Offering prayers, guidance, and mystical knowledge was the primary means by which holy women attracted religious clients and, as with these women, Elisabeth's spirituality revealed itself in her mystical knowledge of forgotten feast days, the spiritual state of others, and the authenticity of relics. Despite her reputation as chiefly a performer and stigmatic, the extant records suggest that the element of her spiritual practice involving miraculous knowledge spanned her whole life, while her Passion performances and stigmata may have comprised only a brief period in her practice. Yet Elisabeth's eventual cessation of her Passion performance was not necessarily due to any alteration in her spirituality. It may simply have been a consequence of the incredible physical demands the performance made on her body, as in the “early retirement” of athletes and dancers today.

In contrast to other religious women such as Juliana or Mechthild of Magdeburg, it is unlikely that Elisabeth was ever in a position that made it necessary for her to join a convent. Nonetheless, she may have joined the community at Herkenrode at some point after the French court incident, dying there as late as 1304.Footnote ⁴¹ Since Elisabeth's major protectors—William of Ryckel, Henry of Guelders, and Philip of Clairvaux—were all dead or deposed by 1273,Footnote ⁴² and no records of her activities exist after 1277, it would seem that she retired from public life shortly after her involvement with the French court and may have ceased her public performances several years earlier.Footnote ⁴³ This may have been a prudent response to the absence of her immediate protectors, but Elisabeth's influence, such as it was, seems not to have suffered from their disappearance since she was involved with the French court several years later. It is likely that Elisabeth retired to Herkenrode due both to the community's support—they had drawn Philip's attention to her over ten years beforeFootnote ⁴⁴—and to its position as a Cistercian house with close ties to the Cistercian network Elisabeth had tried to develop over her life, thus allowing her to retire from the world while retaining her affiliations. This perspective is encouraged by the fact that Herkenrode was likely responsible for promoting Elisabeth's cult after her death.

Elisabeth's Probatio. Dyan Elliott and Nancy Caciola make the two most complete attempts to analyze the religious politics that surrounded Elisabeth.Footnote ⁴⁵ While Elliott is primarily concerned with Philip's proof of Elisabeth's veracity as a holy woman, Caciola offers the fullest analysis to date of Elisabeth's life by discussing Philip's text, the complaint of Gilbert of Tournai, and the documents concerning the French court scandal. She comments:

Given the semi-permanent nature of the written text as opposed to performance, it is true that Elisabeth's self-representations have not lasted as long as “the representations of her crafted by others.” Nonetheless, Caciola's account is less than fair. My analysis of the extant texts demonstrates that Elisabeth considered herself a holy woman who was integral to her political milieu and that behind the portrayals of others was a woman who believed herself capable of wide religious and political influence within the strictures surrounding laywomen of her time. She was never fully “subordinate” to the “ideological viewpoints” of others, for she possessed a shrewd ability to negotiate systems of circulation and exchange, forging lasting connections with a wide variety of people. Moreover, we should not dismiss Philip's text so quickly as mere “early testimony.” Although his text is the earliest of the extant documents, taken as a group they span only ten years (1267–1277), ending when Elisabeth was about thirty. The actual time span of the texts may be shorter, since this begins the count with Philip's visit although he may have written the text any time before 1272, the final year of his abbacy and a time when he was apparently abroad from the abbey and in failing health.Footnote ⁴⁷ In addition, Philip's text is exceedingly complex and cannot be reduced to a “narration … intended to propagate her reputation as a living saint inspired by Cistercian spirituality.” As a probatio, the primary goal of Philip's text is, in fact, to prove Elisabeth's sanctity by testing her.

Dyan Elliott provides an excellent analysis that strips away the political layers of the probatio. Philip states in his report that he went to see Elisabeth solely on account of hearsay, claiming, “When I had heard those wondrous works of the Lord, I, brother Philip of Clairvaux (performing the office of visitation around those parts), did not believe the stories until I myself had gone to see the girl with my own eyes, at which point I proved [probavi] that I had not been told the half of it.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Philip's use of the verb probavi is striking. As Elliott demonstrates in Proving Woman, the Latin verb probare—to prove or to test—was rarely used carelessly because it was, in many respects, a legal term.Footnote ⁴⁹ The primary procedure involving the probatio was the inquisitio or inquisition, originally a judicial procedure from Roman law.Footnote ⁵⁰ Richard Kieckhefer has demonstrated that even during the Middle Ages the term “inquisitio referred to a specific trial following inquisitorial procedure,”Footnote ⁵¹ and the two major institutional forms of ecclesiastical inquisitio were canonization and the inquiry into heresy. Philip's statement that he “proved” that Elisabeth was a wondrous work of the Lord implies that he proceeded, if somewhat unofficially, on the basis of a similar inquiry to produce proof of Elisabeth's spiritual status, deciding among the possibilities of heretic, fraud, and holy woman only after he had tested Elisabeth.

Simone Roisin states that the text is “a report of the inquiry [enquête] made by Abbot Philip of Clairvaux on the stigmatic of Spalbeek, a report written by the inquisitor [enquêteur] himself.”Footnote ⁵² This is true to a point. The text is certainly in large part an inquisitorial account, but Philip does not concentrate on her stigmata. Instead, he attempts to prove Elisabeth's holiness by testing the veracity of her entranced performance. Elliott points out that probare “is also a verb used for torture—a possibility that is at the center of the martyr's passio but that invariably hovers at the edge of the heretical trial.”Footnote ⁵³ Just as Christ's love or a martyr's faith was “proven” through torture, to “prove” a holy woman's veracity and demonstrate that she was not a heretic or fraud often involved actions that would be considered torture today. In the probatio of Douceline of Provence, boiling lead was poured over her bare feet. Her trance was proved legitimate by the fact that at the time she felt nothing, though she was in terrible pain after her trance ended.Footnote ⁵⁴

Philip's tests of Elisabeth's trances were not nearly so severe, but, in her case as well, the proof of sanctity seemed to lie in the legitimacy of her trances. In the case of the feather test, Philip recalled:

The fact that Elisabeth has apparently stopped breathing proves that her trance is authentic. The inquisitional process included the search for such proof, and Philip's text is not only the record of that search; it forms the foundation of his proof. As Elliott notes, “heretical trials or failed canonizations … demonstrate the inquisitio's potential for reversal and other unintended consequences.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The process of inquiry could turn a saint into a heretic; the fine line between them often depended upon the needs of the inquisitors. Luckily for Elisabeth, the mutually productive relationship between Elisabeth and Philip arose at a time when the model of the mulieres religiosae was well-established and thriving. Philip essentially placed Elisabeth on trial, proving her veracity to anyone who—like Gilbert of Tournai shortly thereafter—might be unwilling to believe in the holy woman's divine inspiration. It was as politically advantageous for the Cistercian Philip to claim Elisabeth's divine authority for his order as it was for the Franciscan Gilbert to revile it on behalf of his own order. Philip's text is a subtle blend of probatio and vita, providing enough of each to use Elisabeth's actions as a valuable exemplar for Cistercian spirituality while ostensibly demonstrating his own impartiality.

Since Elliott's primary interest is in the development of the inquisitio, she, like Roisin, understands Philip's text to be an inquiry into Elisabeth's stigmata. Yet Philip is by no means solely an inquisitor. Although Elliott and Caciola are correct in their understanding that Philip is using Elisabeth as an exemplar, Philip's text is nonetheless evidence of a symbiotic relationship between himself and Elisabeth. It is neither simply the record of his inquiry nor a one-sided formulation of Elisabeth's sanctity. As Anneke Mulder-Bakker has observed, hagiography “is not a genre, that of the vita, but a discourse.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Philip's hagiographic probatio is a mixed-genre text combining features of an inquisitio, a vita, and an eyewitness description of a performance, thus creating a unique Latin document that stretches the discursive boundaries of hagiography. The multi-generic nature of Philip's probatio provides ample room for analysis, but very little has been written thus far on the non-performance section of his text. Though it may appear to be little more than a collection of well-worn tales, it proves to be much more when contextualized by the other remaining documents concerning Elisabeth. While Philip's text is certainly laudatory, as Caciola states, it also provides a great deal of information not only about Elisabeth but about those who came to observe her.

III. The Politics of Mysticism

In 1265, just prior to visiting Elisabeth, Philip had gained the upper hand in a power struggle with Abbot James of Cîteaux, the Cistercian motherhouse (1262–1266). Philip won with the aid of Popes Urban IV and Clement IV, and a 1265 bull from Pope Clement IV ended the contest in a manner that in practice allowed Clairvaux to retain and strengthen its position as one of the most powerful houses in the Order. It is possible that Elisabeth's political connections through William of Ryckel ensured Philip's support even as her unique religiosity engaged his interest, for Philip's own political network was extensive, and he fiercely defended his position. During the power struggle with Abbot James, Philip had been elected bishop of Saint-Malo in an attempt to force him to leave Clairvaux, but he declined the election and traveled to Rome despite a threat of excommunication from James. Pope Urban IV granted Philip's requestFootnote ⁵⁸ to remain at Clairvaux and allowed him to stay away from the 1264 General Chapter owing to the possibility of “his imprisonment at Cîteaux.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The visit of Philip and his colleagues not only must have expanded Elisabeth's network of patrons, but it also demonstrated the degree to which she herself had already become an object of pilgrimage. During his visit of several months,Footnote ⁶⁰ Philip himself witnessed a number of people, including a nobleman, come to ask her advice.

In fact, Philip frequently depicts Elisabeth as actively engaged in the politics of patronage in episodes which he ostensibly provides as proof that Elisabeth is, as Barbara Newman says of Ida of Nivelles, “gifted with a kind of spiritual telepathy.”Footnote ⁶¹ In one instance,

According to Philip the boy became an excellent brother, and Elisabeth claimed that she singled him out because “she had perceived him to be among those who would be saved, and, if he had died at that time, the entrance to the heavenly country would quickly have been opened to him. Because of this, she had desired that the boy's state might be strengthened by the remedy of religious life and the company of monks.”Footnote ⁶³ While this may certainly be true, the scene also seems to portray Elisabeth as a young woman who might have some influence at Clairvaux.

While the patronage of a lay brother is not, in itself, remarkable, the episode emphasizes Elisabeth's access to the “spiritual telepathy” that distinguished many of the holy women who preceded her, particularly those whose lives figure in Martinus Cawley's aptly titled collection Send Me God. In addition, the fact that Philip records the event in his carefully structured text gives it an importance it might not otherwise have. Philip distinguishes Elisabeth's portrayal as a mulier religiosa through the use of this particular topos by demonstrating her employment of “spiritual telepathy” not only to craft herself as a patron of the young man, with obvious echoes of Marie d'Oignies and Jacques de Vitry,Footnote ⁶⁴ but also to involve herself in the political workings of Clairvaux and thus the Cistercian Order. Though William's connections contributed to the spread of Elisabeth's fame, she herself seems to have had the ability both to strengthen these ties and to expand them. On the surface, this event may place Elisabeth in a poor light compared with her potential model, Marie d'Oignies, since the patronage of a lay brother is of little significance alongside Marie's relationship with Jacques de Vitry. However, the fact that Abbot Philip is the author of this episode raises the possibility of interpreting the scene as one in which Elisabeth not only proves her spiritual capabilities but also gains Philip's tacit approval to engage, at some level, with the business of his house. At the very least, Elisabeth's actions are those of a young woman aware of both the political possibilities of building networks and the means through which a woman such as herself might begin to build them.

While the above episode seems to demonstrate Elisabeth's interest in the networks of the religious orders, Philip confirms the extent of Elisabeth's reputation among the laity in his description of a different encounter:

While Philip again concentrates on Elisabeth's spiritual telepathy—that is, her miraculous knowledge of the nobleman's excommunication—equally interesting is the very fact of his arrival. It seems unlikely that his name would have been unknown to Elisabeth and her family, especially William, even if the nobleman himself was unknown by sight. Yet if true, he must have traveled some distance to visit Elisabeth. His identity today remains a mystery, but his very presence indicates the possible scope of Elisabeth's reputation as a holy woman even as her denunciation of the nobleman proved that her reputation was deserved.

These episodes demonstrate that Elisabeth was accustomed to receiving laypeople as visitors, but her interaction with the group of visitors Philip brought with him, or eventually summoned from elsewhere, shows her ability to engage in religious dialogue with monks as well. Philip's group includes not only the servants discussed above, but also “my colleagues and I, all abbots and monks.”Footnote ⁶⁶ These abbots and monks, unfortunately, remain anonymous, and it is impossible to know how many people were in Philip's group, how many abbeys they represented, and whether anyone present besides William was from Sint-Truiden. There are two other tantalizing references to Philip's group. Near the end of his work, Philip mentions “our interpreter, a Dutch monk of Clairvaux, who was known to her.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Elisabeth apparently knew the monk even before he visited with Philip, and if this is so, we have evidence of one more pre-existent connection between Philip and Elisabeth. Moreover, this comment also clarifies the form of communication between Elisabeth and Philip.

The presence of the interpreter, together with a reference to Abbot William as “our instructor and our faithful and certain interpreter of her girlish speeches,”Footnote ⁶⁸ tells us that Elisabeth spoke only Dutch while Philip and his colleagues from Clairvaux spoke French. Consequently, any dialogue between Elisabeth and Philip or the other abbots was indirect, and it is easily possible that the “interpreters” did more than simply translate Elisabeth's words. Philip rarely quotes Elisabeth except when she is explaining her actions by detailing what her divine inspiration has made known to her, and the inability to communicate directly may account for Philip's emphasis on Elisabeth's actions, which he could see and prove. Despite the relationships Elisabeth was obviously forming with Philip and his fellow visitors, there is very little description of any actual dialogue between them and Elisabeth.

Philip's second specific reference to his colleagues occurs in another scene of interaction, during one of Elisabeth's meals in which “a companion of ours (our fellow abbot from Vauclair) touched a spoonful of milk to her mouth.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Philip dwells on the fact that Elisabeth barely touched the milk—finishing only the one spoonful in three painful sips—and hints that this failure to require nourishment helps to prove her legitimacy. However, the fact that he names the abbot of Vauclair as part of the company of “abbots and monks” visiting Elisabeth demonstrates that there were abbots present other than Philip and William, and that the abbot of Vauclair was named solely because he participated in this particular portion of Elisabeth's probatio. Philip's group seems to have included a large number of highly placed Cistercians—a tribute either to his connections or to the breadth of the inquiry into Elisabeth. Either way, Philip's companions supply evidence of Elisabeth's ability to draw people to her even as each individual provided Elisabeth with an array of potential external connections. Elisabeth's communication with the abbot of Vauclair was limited, in this case at least, to their actions, but William's list of relics confirms continued contact between the abbot and Elisabeth.

Visitors were not Elisabeth's only connection to other spiritual companions, however, for Philip discovered that she had a spiritual companion whom she herself could visit. As we have seen, Elisabeth was physically unable to visit other mulieres religiosae, but Philip's text furnishes evidence for one of the most fascinating relationships between two holy women: that of Elisabeth of Spalbeek and Marie of Lille. According to Philip, their friendship was based on their visionary knowledge of each other. Although she and Marie of Lille had never met in person, Elisabeth told Philip that “they saw one another often since their trances frequently occurred at the same time.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This vision is a mutual vision that enables a virtual pilgrimage; Elisabeth and Marie see each other in real time when their trances coincide. As Philip recalls, Elisabeth told him, through William of Ryckel, that

Many women had visions of others—for instance, Marie d'Oignies had a vision of her hagiographer, Jacques de Vitry, as he was being ordained in ParisFootnote ⁷³—and Send Me God takes its title from the ability of some holy figures to “gift” others spiritually—that is, to provide other holy people of their choosing with heightened spiritual episodes such as trance and divine possession. In one case, a priest who had been “sent God” by Ida of Nivelles went into trance, in which state he saw and was blessed by Ida. Later inquiry confirmed that Ida was in trance at the time, but Ida's view of the incident is unknown.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover, she and the priest in question—like Marie d'Oignies and Jacques de Vitry—already knew each other in the physical world. Hadewijch of Brabant's “List of the Perfect” is a record of her visions of many holy people whom she had seen or known in her life, but she did not interact with any of these people in her visions.Footnote ⁷⁵

Elisabeth's vision was distinct from these, for it involved a simultaneous meeting and exchange between two spiritual equals who had never met in the physical realm. Neither woman “gifted” the other, nor, apparently, were they aware of each other by reputation before beginning their spiritual encounters. They met in trance and continued to visit in this manner as two holy women who had no need for any external interference or physical messenger. This is all the more interesting given the potential language barrier between them, since Marie probably spoke French. Their communication was thus in all ways miraculous, and even though Elisabeth could not physically leave her room without aid except during her trance-performance, the mutual vision solidified her reputation as a mystic while extending and reinforcing her network. Philip states that he himself knew Marie of Lille well and that one of her patrons was King Louis IX of France, making her an excellent connection for Elisabeth. Yet the ultimate importance of the vision lies in the fact that it allowed Elisabeth to overcome her disability virtually and to form a virtual, mystic relationship akin to that of Juliana of Mont-Cornillon and Eve of Saint Martin. Elisabeth adapted the visionary tradition to create a new method of exchange that expanded and strengthened her religious and political networks.

Despite Philip's insistence that neither Elisabeth nor William knew anything directly about Marie, the episode may serve to suggest the extent of the religious network to which Elisabeth belonged. The parallels between the two women are inescapable, particularly given the fact that Abbot William, like the king of France, had a chapel built especially for his holy woman. Although Elisabeth and Marie had never met, other people—like Abbot Philip and his visitation party—had obviously moved between them. The relic documents attest this, since a Marie of Lille in Flanders appears on the list of those to whom Elisabeth and William sent relics.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Relics of Sint-Truiden. From 1270–1272, William collected an extensive array of relics,Footnote ⁷⁷ and his inventory records the numerous relics sent to him and Elisabeth. He also records the relics they sent to others, such as Marie of Lille and numerous Cistercian monks and nuns. Some of these, like the abbot of Vauclair, may have visited Elisabeth in the company of Philip of Clairvaux. It is possible, for example, that the unnamed interpreter from Clairvaux and the anonymous lay brother both appear on the list of recipients at Clairvaux. In addition, although there is no hint as to whether Vauclair had a link to Elisabeth before Philip's visit (as Clairvaux may have had through the interpreter), this connection certainly remained important, for quite a few of the relics were sent to the abbot and monks of Vauclair. Besides the many recipients, the main supplier listed is “Sister Hedwig of Susato, a nun at Saint Maccabees in Cologne,” who sent the relics through a woman named Ermentrude,Footnote ⁷⁸ although others—including a prior of Val Dieu—also sent Elisabeth relics.Footnote ⁷⁹ This circulation of relics inevitably strengthened and expanded Elisabeth's network,Footnote ⁸⁰ but, like her visions of Marie of Lille, it also offered Elisabeth the possibility of forming close spiritual bonds with those whom she could not visit.

In The Invention of Saintliness, Anneke Mulder-Bakker describes “the conviction that saints and the holy forge a link between God and humanity. This often takes place through the medium of persons, but in many cases also through objects. …We could call this the type of the ‘power stations,’ places where the divine could be tapped.”Footnote ⁸¹ Relics, holy sites, and living saints served very similar purposes, and just as networks grew between living saints, they also formed between holy people and specific relics or holy sites. Elisabeth's chapel became a holy site for Philip and those whom he describes, and it remained so after her death, serving as the site upon which her spiritual power could be “tapped.” In addition to being a pilgrimage site, Elisabeth employed the traditional exercises of mulieres religiosae in order to partake in the circulation of people and objects that created religious networks. She was not a passive object of pilgrimage and its resulting circulation. Instead, she actively participated in the gift exchange that produced and maintained religious and political associations.

A relic guaranteed to be authentic was a gift of great value, offering a portable link through which “the divine could be tapped.” While the relationship between women religious and their religious clients took many forms, such as Elisabeth's patronage of the lay brother or her agreement to pray for a member of Philip's retinue,Footnote ⁸² the connection created by relics was not an isolated event. The value of an authentic relic remained constant since its power could be invoked at any time, and the action of presenting or receiving such a gift created a relationship that was presumably intended to last. Such a gift from a holy woman was worth a good deal of support—economic or otherwise—from the recipient. However, the guarantee of a relic's authenticity was no small matter, for it required supernatural knowledge that was beyond ordinary clerics. I believe that Maurice Coens is correct in thinking that Elisabeth identified and authenticated the relics of Sint-Truiden. Coens rightly sees echoes of the relationship between Elisabeth of Schönau and her brother Ekbert,Footnote ⁸³ for in the mid-twelfth century, Elisabeth of Schönau had authenticated and identified a number of Ursuline relics through a series of visions that her brother recorded.Footnote ⁸⁴ Elisabeth of Spalbeek likely provided a similar service for the Ursuline relics of Abbot William of Ryckel, who was not only her relative but who also considered her his “spiritual daughter.”Footnote ⁸⁵ While relic identification was not uncommon among holy women, Elisabeth not only authenticated and identified the relics but became a full participant in their exchange.Footnote ⁸⁶ Her guarantee of the relics' authenticity enabled their circulation among her associates, as well as among William's, and several of the recipients seem to have been acquainted primarily with her.

Coens believes that Elisabeth was able to send the relics she received to friends of her own choosing, and the evidence of the document confirms this. As William states, “I sent the heads of [Saint] Andrew and [Saint] Elisabeth to Peter, abbot of Igny, and in addition Elisabeth, our daughter, also sent the small head of the blessed Uda.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Another relic that may have been sent on Elisabeth's initiative was dispatched on August 20, 1271: the bodies of several saints were conveyed to Marie of Turri who lived at Lille in Flanders.Footnote ⁸⁸ This was undoubtedly the same Marie of Lille with whom Elisabeth shared the visions that Philip described. Since these relics were sent to Marie roughly four years after Philip's visit, it is clear that even if Elisabeth, William, and Marie had not been in contact at the time—as Philip so carefully stressed—they obviously made and maintained contact after the visit.

This entry also demonstrates that Elisabeth's participation in the relic exchange is not always self-evident. The entry does not directly state that Elisabeth sent the relics, nor that they were sent upon her request. Nonetheless, the connection is undeniably of her forging, suggesting that others on the list may easily have been connected to Elisabeth as well as to William. The inventory thus hints at the breadth of their religious connections and at their efforts to maintain and strengthen them, implying a wide circle of patronage involving the exchange of political support through the giving and receiving of relics. In one particularly significant case, a relic was sent on August 24, 1271, to the Dominicans in Dijon by way of a duchess of Brabant. The duchess is not otherwise named, but there are only two possibilities. Marguerite, the daughter of King Louis IX of France and wife of Duke John I of Brabant, died in 1271 and is unlikely to be the duchess mentioned. Far more likely is Adelaide, the former duchess of Brabant and widow of Duke Henry III of Brabant, who was a strong supporter of the Dominicans and founded the Dominican house of Val-Duchesse.

William wrote under the entry that “I sent Saint John via the duchess of Brabant to all the Dominican friars at Dijon.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The extent to which the duchess herself was involved in the gift is unclear, but this is one of the few non-Cistercian connections mentioned in William's inventory. Given Adelaide's strong personal support for the Dominicans, her direct participation seems probable. The exchange is particularly important because it demonstrates a possible connection between Elisabeth and the women of the Brabant ducal house. Elisabeth's relationship to one of these women—Marie of BrabantFootnote ⁹⁰—is the central issue of the last set of documents concerning her life. Marie of Brabant was the daughter of Henry III and sister of John I of Brabant.Footnote ⁹¹ As a glance at the genealogical chart shows, she had briefly been the sister-in-law of King Philip III of France, when Marguerite was married to John I. The connection between the French royal family and the ducal house of Brabant was very close, and it is within the realm of possibility that Elisabeth was known to the French court even before Marie married Philip III. Elisabeth was also associated with Marie of Lille, whose patron was King Louis IX, providing another potential avenue through which the court may have heard of her. At any rate, the connection between Elisabeth, Marie, and the French court would unexpectedly involve Elisabeth in court politics three years after Marie's marriage.

French Court Politics. In 1276, Prince Louis died. Louis was the oldest son of King Philip III and his first wife, Isabella of Aragon. Court politics immediately swung into action over the cause of death, and the resulting chaos is not easy to untangle. The struggle involved Pierre de Benais, who was the bishop of Bayeux,Footnote ⁹² and Pierre de la Broce,Footnote ⁹³ who was the chamberlain of Philip III. These two were related by marriage and joined in alliance against the new queen, Marie of Brabant. The struggle commenced when Pierre de Benais, perhaps at the behest of Pierre de la Broce, began to spread a rumor that Marie had poisoned the prince.Footnote ⁹⁴ A competing story attributed to two beguines, one of whom was Elisabeth, warned that Prince Louis had died by divine retribution because King Philip was sinning against nature.Footnote ⁹⁵ While the two rumors seem to respond to one another, which came first and precisely why it started are unclear. The rival versions of the ensuing intrigue in its totality are equally difficult to resolve, but the most important documents are reports by two men who were personally involved in the events they recorded. One was the papal legate Simon de Brion (the future Pope Martin IV); the other was the bishop of Liège, Jean d'Enghien. The other primary source describing this incident is the Life of Philip III by Guillaume de Nangis, which survives in both the original Latin and a contemporaneous French translation. However, Nangis's retelling is far less detailed, was written after the affair ended, and refers only to an unnamed “beguine of Nivelles.” Since those directly involved likely provided the most reliable depictions of the affair, I follow the accounts of Simon de Brion and Jean d'Enghien.

It seems that after Prince Louis's death, the chamberlain, Pierre de la Broce, and his relative Pierre de Benais seized an opportunity to discredit the queen by attempting to spread rumors that she had poisoned the king's son. These rumors failed to take hold, but not long afterward a canon of Laon sent word to the king that two holy women from Liège—one of them ElisabethFootnote ⁹⁶—had told him that the king's son had died because Philip was sinning against nature and that unless he changed his ways his line would die out. Philip ordered an investigation, and Pierre de Benais was made responsible for questioning the holy women, together with the bishop of Liège. Both women denied having said anything whatsoever about the death of Louis and stated that the king was virtuous.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, Benais later departed from the account confirmed by d'Enghien's letters, telling Simon de Brion that Elisabeth had told him (Benais) in secret that the prince had in fact been poisoned by the queen. A second investigation ensued, and Elisabeth and the canon of Laon confronted each other. Nonetheless, Elisabeth maintained her previous testimony—that she had not said anything to anyone about the death of Louis—and she refused to corroborate Benais's story.

A third investigation involving the bishop of Liège took place some time later.Footnote ⁹⁸ Elisabeth now explained that Benais had given her the story about the queen poisoning the young prince and that she had responded by saying “she knew nothing about it, nor did she believe it to be true, because it was so horrible to have such a suspicion of the queen.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet even this was not the end. A report by the bishop of Liège describes in detail a fourth interview with Elisabeth. This document begins by saying that Benais's translator testified that Elisabeth “said that the prince was poisoned by someone in the queen's suite.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When Elisabeth was asked about the man's testimony, “she once again denied under oath having said any such thing and persisted even when confronted with [him].”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Finally, a third person testified that one of Benais's men had asked Elisabeth to change her story, but she had refused.Footnote ¹⁰² To summarize, Benais and the chamberlain's party had used false rumors and testimony in several instances in a desperate attempt to force Elisabeth to implicate the queen, but every effort failed to shake Elisabeth. She denied the words placed in her mouth and finally accused Benais of attempting to force her to repeat his story. Benais's translator made one final effort to unnerve Elisabeth, but she held her ground.

The upshot of this affair was the execution of the chamberlain,Footnote ¹⁰³ the imprisonment of the canon of Laon, and the escape of Pierre de Benais, the bishop of Bayeux, to Rome. The last report by the bishop of Liège seems to have been the final word on the matter, but there are many ways to understand the contradictory nature of these accounts. Nancy Caciola concludes that Elisabeth was “a weak, vain, and manipulable woman. … Elisabeth emerges as an opportunist: different agents attributed various positions to her, and she did nothing to disavow these positions until they became inconvenient. Her only interest was to extend her reputation as an inspired prophetess.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This is patently unfair. The court intrigue boils down to a failed attempt by the chamberlain's party to overthrow the queen, though there was apparently widespread speculation that the queen's party had begun the whole affair to overthrow the chamberlain.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Either might be true, since the chamberlain's party and the Brabantine party at the French court were certainly at odds. Yet either way, a careful reading of the documents shows that Elisabeth was far from “weak, vain, and manipulable.” Rather, she was calculating and confident, just as she had been when she threw the excommunicated nobleman out of her home or asked Clairvaux to accept a new lay brother from among their servants.

Given Elisabeth's connections to the Brabantine house, it does not seem likely that she would ever have accused the queen, and the only people who claimed she did were members of the chamberlain's party. It is more likely that she spoke against the king on behalf of Marie of Brabant, but if Elisabeth had ever claimed that King Philip was to blame for his son's death, she seems to have remained firm about her denial once confronted. It is interesting to note that whether the rumors about the king were started before or after the rumors about the queen, they formed an effective response, and the battle between the chamberlain and the queen ended in a Brabantine victory. It is not inconceivable that Elisabeth—at the request of the Brabantine party or, less likely, on her own initiative—prophesied against the king. However, even if she had previously spoken against him, her subsequent denials were nonetheless calculated and effective. Doubt about the king's virtue, belief in his partial responsibility for his son's death, and distrust of the chamberlain had already been raised, and Elisabeth's apparent support of the king kept her fervent support of the queen from being suspect.

The major difficulty with the textual evidence surrounding this event is that Elisabeth's words are always reported secondhand. The entire affair is one of “he said, she said,” and our interpretation of the evidence depends a great deal on whom we choose to believe. Remco Sleiderink presents Elisabeth as a prophetess, already known for identifying William of Ryckel's relics and for envisioning the spiritual states of others,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ who was necessary to the machinations of both of the warring parties at the French court and sided alternately with them both, eventually backing down from her claims against the queen out of fear of being unmasked as a fraud or on account of pressure from the Brabantine party.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, I distrust the nature of reported speech in such a highly charged affair, especially when those reporting Elisabeth's words often had a very high political stake in what she may have said. The numerous interviews with Elisabeth seem to me to arise from two sources: the need for the chamberlain's party to use her words to their advantage, and the need for Simon de Brion to unravel Elisabeth's testimony as confusingly reported by the chamberlain's party. That Elisabeth's words were altered and that words may have been put in her mouth altogether does not seem unreasonable for such a situation, in which a group of powerful men were attempting to manipulate a prophetess's abilities for their own political ends.

The open question is, of course, how fickle was Elisabeth? As I have observed, when her words are reported directly by Jean d'Enghien, it finally becomes clear that no one reliable ever heard her say anything against the king or the queen. Yet her continued participation in the crisis implies that she was not involved entirely against her will. If her political networking in previous situations was ultimately of slight consequence despite apparent validation of her spiritual authority by the abbot of Clairvaux, the French court scandal involved unquestionable political intrigue. The potentially dangerous affair provided a forum for Elisabeth to exchange her divine authority for advantageous political support she may not have enjoyed otherwise. Despite this, there is no evidence that she was, in Caciola's words, “an opportunist” whose “only interest was to extend her reputation as an inspired prophetess.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The problem for the parties of the French court scandal appears to be that Elisabeth, despite her interest in furthering her reputation, was not easy to manipulate. Moreover, Elisabeth was not—in this instance—necessarily engaged in expanding her reputation. While other holy women did use their prophetic abilities to aid political figures, the direct ties between Elisabeth and Marie of Brabant suggest the possibility of a more personal relationship between the holy woman and the queen.

In my interpretation, Elisabeth repaid the support of the Brabantine dynasty—if not their support of Elisabeth personally, then their support of William of Ryckel—by throwing her weight behind the queen. The fact that the chamberlain's party was so desirous to have Elisabeth on their side suggests that this weight was not inconsiderable. While Elisabeth may in fact have altered the practice of prophecy for political ends, her goal was to safeguard a patroness. That Elisabeth was known to the warring parties at the French court seems to me to be a testament to her success in building and maintaining affiliations, and what I perceive to be her unwavering defense of the queen demonstrates her confidence in a delicate situation. This remains true even if Elisabeth first came to the attention of the court through the potentially false report of the canon of Laon, for both parties clearly considered her to be a valuable resource and likely would have offered support in return for the application of her prophetic gifts on their behalf. Whatever the case, I believe that Elisabeth's connection, tenuous or otherwise, to the Brabantine party made her choice far from opportunistic. The downfall of Pierre de la Broce, though greatly desired by both the Brabantine party and, according to William Chester Jordan's “The Struggle for Influence at the Court of Philip III,”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ by much of the nobility in France, was in no way certain, and Elisabeth's role in the affair's conclusion may not have been inconsequential. Despite the possible risk, this episode shows her not only obtaining political support through her networks but providing it as well. Marie of Brabant later funded the completion of the infirmary at the convent of La Reine or La Royauté,Footnote ¹¹⁰ whose chapel was dedicated to Saint Elisabeth.Footnote ¹¹¹ It is no doubt for this reason that “well-established tradition” claimed Marie had founded the convent in honor of Elisabeth of Spalbeek.Footnote ¹¹² While the convent was already standing, perhaps its patron saint was part of the reason Marie founded the infirmary there; it would be a lovely testimony to the continuing spiritual and political connection between these two women.

While I certainly move into the realm of extensive speculation in my understanding of this episode, I feel that the previously recounted evidence regarding Elisabeth's life serves to re-contextualize her involvement in the political realm of the French court. Philip's text portrays a woman of strength and spiritual devotion who enacts Christ's Passion daily and has done so for a number of years. She has been granted the stigmata, and a visiting group of Cistercian abbots and monks believe in her veracity and admire her gift of “spiritual telepathy.” If Elisabeth could pass Philip's probatio, it is not inconceivable that she was self-assured and constant during the interviews pertaining to the French court intrigue. While her impact on the religious community was not earth-shattering, the events that Philip describes demonstrate Elisabeth's interest in participating in the widespread religious networks whose paths carried both spiritual and secular power between its members. Philip's representation of Elisabeth is not of a woman easily manipulated but of one engaged in a number of spiritual exercises that, in one way or another, connect her to people of influence. This aspect of Elisabeth is further strengthened by the evidence of the relic exchange in which she seems not only to have aided her relative but to have participated as fully as possible herself.