This chapter seeks to highlight an arena in which medieval women exercised religious leadership that has been largely overlooked: the miracle cult. Miracle cults, the phenomenon of people claiming miraculous experiences through the merits and action of deceased saints, were common in the medieval centuries and sprang up in numerous places throughout Europe. Other aspects of saints’ cults, such as the composition of hagiographic texts, the performance of liturgies and processions, and the patronage of major works of cultic art and architecture, were largely (though certainly not entirely) governed by religious men with wealth, literacy, and elite status. Miracle cults, in contrast, provided a much more open and freeform arena for religious leadership of people of all social classes, including lay, lower-status, and illiterate women. Thus, analysis of miracle cults is important not only for expanding our sense of how medieval women exercised religious leadership, but also which types of women had the opportunity to lead .

Evidence for laywomen's leadership roles in miracle cults is largely found within written collections of miracle stories and canonization dossiers, but there are visual sources as well. This essay begins with an analysis of two particularly striking images depicting laywomen from the early thirteenth-century stained glass of Canterbury Cathedral. These two panels, which picture a miracle of Thomas Becket, will serve as springboards into a study of two important aspects of laywomen's cultic leadership: first, the collective leadership of groups of laywomen at saints’ tombs and in their local neighborhoods, and second, the creation and distribution of contact relics (dust from saints’ tombs, pieces of clothing worn by saints, and the like) by individual laywomen. On both of these topics, I will focus on laywomen's cultic leadership in non-domestic contexts. There is no question that women took on cultic leadership roles within their own families. The vast majority of the nursing of the ill or injured was done by female family members, and these female caretakers were normally the ones who made decisions about whether and how to seek miraculous aid.