Traces of holiness: blessed women, holy women in the papers of diocesan archives

The article aims to focus attention on the study of blessed women and holy women through the documentation found in diocesan archives and belonging to the series of canonization processes. With the regulation of the process, narrative organization gave way to legal defense, confrontation to analysis, and narrative to texts that had evidentiary value, and all this gave rise to a mine of information not only about the lives of the blessed and holy women, but also about the society in which they had lived.