The communities distributing information about saints’ infirmitates were not static, but their structures and respective relations changed and were renegotiated. Moreover, the communities of the saints under investigation here, and the group of devotees believing in their holiness or promoting and/or testifying about it, varied greatly. Due to the socioeconomic background of the saints, their closest associates tended to be clerics and nuns, often with elite background, or belong to the secular elite. Furthermore, as stated in the Introduction, witnesses belonging to the elite, and especially elite men, were favoured as witnesses to saints’ lives. Therefore the image of saintly infirmities as represented in canonization testimonies was primarily born in their circle, and they were also the people who interacted with the infirm saint most intimately on an everyday basis.

Living saints performed miracles, which was one of the prerequisites for canonization, although in most hearings a majority of the miracles investigated were post mortem. Often the miracula in vita were recorded among the testimonies to the saint's life. Some of the devotees searching for a miraculous intervention came from the social elite as well, but the larger public recorded as having received saintly assistance were townspeople and other persons from the ‘middle’ social strata. The number of miracles in vita that were recorded (as opposed to the number believed by various people to have occurred) varies significantly from hearing to hearing; for ecclesiastical authorities, their status was less straightforward than that of miracles post mortem.