The end of the fourteenth century saw the first reform attempts of the Order of Preachers and the beginning of the Great Western Schism (1378). Elias Raymundus of Toulouse, elected as the Master of the Order in Avignon on 6 June 1367, was a fervent reformer. He seems to have already launched vigorous renewal inside the Order from when he was appointed as a vicar on 21 February 1365. Elias's activity as a reformer, however, has been overshadowed by the next Master of the Order, Raymond of Capua. This is evident in studies of Dominican history from the beginning of the twentieth century: for example, father Daniel-Antonin Mortier pointed out, in his major work on general masters of the Order of Preachers, that Elias's principal administrative act was the transportation of Thomas Aquinas's remains (d. 1274) from a Cistercian house in Italy to the Dominican convent in Toulouse, France, in 1368-1369. After making this important observation, Mortier does not try to combine Elias's efforts for reform and the establishment of the relic cult, nor the influence of the Schism on both of them. The same is applicable to more recent studies: the combination of all three – the reform, the Schism, and Thomas's relic cult – has remained without particular attention, which makes the issue worth approaching.

Nevertheless, those sources which tell us about the translation of Thomas Aquinas's remains were products of their age and, as such, they offer a way to analyze the impact of the reform and the Schism in those communities where the texts were used.