Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/109

 THE GUGLIELMITES. 93 mere fact that miracles were performed was no evidence, as they are frequently the work of demons to deceive the faithful.* In this case the Archbishop of Milan offered no interference, and the worship of Guglielma was soon firmly established. A month after the translation Andrea had the body exhumed and carried into the church, where he washed it with wine and water and arrayed it in a splendid embroidered robe. The washings were carefully preserved, to be used as a chrism for the sick ; they were placed on the altar of the nunnery of Biassono, and Maifreda employed them in anointing the affected parts of those who came to be healed. Presently a chapel with an altar arose over her tomb, and tradition still points out at Chiaravalle the little oratory where she is said to have lain, and a portrait on the wall over the vacant tomb is asserted to be hers. It represents her as kneeling before the Virgin, to wdiom she is presented by St. Bernard, the patron of the abbey ; a crowd of other figures is around her, and the whole indicates that those who dedicated it to her represented her as merely a saint, and not as an incarnation of the Godhead. Another picture of her was placed by Dionisio Cotta in the Church of St. Maria fuori di Porta Nuova, and two lamps were kept burning before it to obtain her suffrage for the soul of his brother interred there. Other pictures were hung in the Church of S. Eufemia and in the nunnery of Biassono. In all this the good monks of Chiaravalle were not remiss. They kept lighted lamps before her altar. Two feast-days w T ere assigned to her — the anni- versaries of her death and of her translation — when the devotees would assemble at the abbey, and the monks would furnish a simple banquet, outside of the walls — for the Cistercian rules for- bade the profanation of a woman's presence within the sacred enclosure — and some of the monks would discourse eloquently upon the saintliness of Guglielma, comparing her to other saints and to the moon and stars, and receiving such oblations as the piety of the worshippers would offer. Nor was this the only gain to the abbey. Giacobbe de' JNovati, one of the believers, belonged to one of the noblest families of Milan, and at his castle the Guglielmites Parmens. aim. 1279 (Muratori S. K. I. IX. 791-2).— Zanchini Tract, de Hseret. c. xxii.
 * Ogniben, op. cit. pp. 30,44, 115.— Salimbene Chronica, pp. 274-6.— Chron.