This is why I read history

Currently reading Caroline Walker Bynum's Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond and finding myself fascinated by some of the small details that crop up as she's telling the rest of her story. She's looking into blood miracles, specifically things like consecrated hosts that bleed, and the huge theological interest in them that both the educated priest and the uneducated peasant possessed. Tracts were written in support of the relics, against the relics, by Protestants pointing out how idolatrous Catholics worshiped them, by Catholics who pointed to them as evidence of Jewish evil, by Catholics who scolded other Catholics for believing in obvious frauds...and everything in between. And then little tidbits like this paragraph pop up, and I'm just fascinated all over again. It's about the larger worry people in the late medieval period felt about transubstantiation and the Eucharist, and some of the things that happened because of this worry.

"Both laypeople and members of religious orders felt increased reluctance about a sacramental reception that would, because it placed God objectively in their mouths, damn them if any element of their spiritual intention or preparation was flawed. The faithful were urged to encounter with eyes where encounter with lips was dangerous and rare, to "eat" by "seeing." By the thirteenth century, we find stories of people attending mass only for the moment of elevation, racing from church to church to see as many consecrations as possible, and shouting at the priest to hold the host up higher. An account even survives of guild members bringing charges against a priest for assigning them places in church from which they could not see the elevated host." (p. 87)

The mental image of a back pew of people yelling at the priest because they can't see clearly just makes me boggle in the best way.