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Elizabeth of Spalbeek was already a well-known if controversial visionary by 1276. In that year a prophecy was attributed to her in which she claimed that God was angry with King Philip III because of the king’s sins against nature. The papal legate Simon of Brie verified that he had heard a similar rumor. In the course of four separate missions to question Elizabeth, the party of Pierre de La Broce and Bishop Pierre de Benais also attributed to her the prophetic claim that Queen Marie of Brabant had poisoned her stepson, the heir to the throne. In the end Elizabeth relied on staunch denial, and chose to silence her own prophetic voice to avoid censure.

Chapter 3 analyses how stigmatization became predominantly linked to women and female spirituality. It considers the strong theological defence that evolved in the second half of the thirteenth century that asserted holy, virginal women were axiomatic stigmatics. It also inspects the religious lives of stigmatics that often consisted of routinized prayer, illness, and suffering. The nature of invisible stigmata is investigated; it is demonstrated that there is a connection between the development of invisible stigmatization and the increase in female stigmatics during the thirteenth century. As living icons of Christ, these women brought to mind the divine passion and inspired hope in human redemption. Illness and holiness blended into a powerful cocktail of salvation as represented in the stigmatic body. But it was not only their likeness to Christ, but also their likeness to Mary that was remarkable. As virgins, their flesh was sympathetic and open to wounding making them ideal bearers of stigmata.

Chroniclers such as Primat writing about the Capetians in the 1270s made little mention of holy women, but in the 1280s, spurred on by canonization hearings for Louis IX, there was a flurry of literary attempts to shape perception of recent events around Isabelle of France and Elizabeth of Spalbeek, most importantly in writings by Agnes of Harcourt and William of Nangis. Moreover, far to the south the Franciscan chronicler Salimbene wrote of Douceline of Digne as well as the prophecies of an unnamed Italian holy woman concerning Philip III and Charles of Anjou.

After 1314 new scandals at the Capetian court focused on women as dangers, including Philip IV’s attack on his own daughters-in-law but also charges of sorcery against the royal cousin Mahaut of Artois. Most dramatically, Margueronne of Bellevillette emerged from prison with new self-accusations of sorcery and poisoning. After the death of the last Capetian king in 1328, chroniclers worked to re-imagine earlier female figures either as holy voices or dark forces. In the case of Isabelle of France, such chroniclers created the false impression that she had been a nun of Longchamp. Elizabeth of Spalbeek was given a more positive spin in a new French translation of William of Nangis’s earlier account. And Paupertas of Metz’s story was shortened in such a way as to make her into a more diabolical figure, while Marguerite Porete was represented in ways that made her seem like a more obvious threat to the kingdom.