ABSTRACT
The canonisation records of Thomas Aquinas report a miracle that was said to have taken place on l on October 1321: Iacoba Waldebruni from Sonnino was travelling from Sonnino to Priverno to visit a surgeon because there was ‘a tumor about a size of two fists of an ordinary man in her throat.’ According to a witness, Bartholomaeus de Sompnino (a local priest and Iacoba’ relative), the tumor was making Iacoba’s life difficult: she had problems breathing and speaking understandably. When she was on her way to magister Andrea, called Papaleo, the surgeon, and passing by Fossanova, ‘she heard the bells of the monastery of Fossanova and the existing memory of blessed Thomas Aquinas who laid there, she devoutly dedicated herself to Thomas to be restored to health by blessed Thomas without any incision.’ That same day Iacoba returned home and realised that she had been cured without any medical intervention.1 The statement suggests that Thomas’s thaumaturgical memory was alive and widespread among the laity in the surroundings of Fossanova. The bells of the abbey would have rung to celebrate a new miracle occurring at the tomb. Iacoba Waldebruni’s miracle offers a good picture of Thomas Aquinas’s saintly fame in the early fourteenth-century southern Italy.
