With these words, the famous Dominican preacher Remigio de’ Girolami (c. 1240-1319) expressed what must have been the prevalent Dominican opinion regarding Thomas's body: it would have been both justified and natural to place the spiritual brother and praised saint of the Dominican Order in one of its own churches. However, complaints, demands, and explanations to that effect fell on deaf ears at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is significant that the corpse did not belong to the Dominicans, who formulated the official image of the Saint and played the greatest role in promoting Thomas's cult, especially after his canonization in 1323. The Cistercians of Fossanova kept the corpse to themselves till the middle of the fourteenth century, when the Count of Fondi, Honoratus I, took Thomas's remains to his castle, as we have seen in the previous chapter.

The determination of the Dominicans to gain custody of Thomas's body is reflected in the fervour with which they pursued this end. In the process, they produced a lot of material about Thomas's death and his corpse, which either directly or indirectly broached the subject of its location. In this chapter I will examine the Order of Preachers’ management of Thomas's relic cult in a situation in which they—and in particular the Southern Italian convents—did not hold his relics. Despite their failure to gain custody of the relics, the Dominicans nevertheless venerated them and promoted the relic cult through their activities. I will trace the ways in which they created the presence of the body among themselves and the lay audience, especially through literature and liturgy, but to a lesser extent also objects. How did they or the non-Dominican audience perceive this body created by performance? In this broad discussion the question of ownership of the corpse functions as the thread for my analysis.

The canonization of Thomas Aquinas was celebrated with all the pertinent festivities in Avignon in Southern France in July 1323. The canonization signified that a saint, who was first locally accepted and venerated, possibly in different communities, and whose memory varied from place to place, became universally recognized by the Pope, who also confirmed her or his official Life.