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Faced with such ambiguous advice, many pious people in the later Middle Ages developed, along with a frenzied hunger for the host, an intense fear of receiving it. Margaret of Cortona, for example, pled frantically with her confessor for frequent communion but, when given the privilege by Christ, abstained out of terror at her unworthiness.

— Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum (The new historicism : studies in cultural poetics) (Page 58)

A work attributed to abbot Nilus (d. 430) adds to the idea that Adam's sin was gluttony the notion was that matter weighs down spirit:

It was the desire of food that spawned disobedience; it was the pleasure of taste that drove us from Paradise. Luxury food delights the gullet, but it breeds the worm of license that sleepeth not. An empty stomach prepares one for watching and prayer; the full one induces sleep.

— Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum (The new historicism : studies in cultural poetics) (Page 36)

By 1500, indeed, the model of the female saint, expressed both in popular veneration and in official canonizations, was in many ways the mirror image of society's notion of the witch. Each was thought to be possessed, whether by God or by Satan; each seemed able to read the minds and hearts of others with uncanny shrewdness; each was suspected of flying through the air, whether in saintly levitation or bilocation, or in a witches' Sabbath. Moreover, each bore mysterious wounds, whether stigmata or the marks of incubi, on her body.

— Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum (The new historicism : studies in cultural poetics) (Page 23)

Moreover, for many girls, it was the presence, not the absence, of a prospective bridegroom that activated desire for perpetual chastity.

— Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum (The new historicism : studies in cultural poetics) (Page 20)

Unlike the more charitably inclined members of the laity, moreover, the clergy never issues acts of grace that relieved their debtors of their burdens.

— Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail (Page 269)

In cases where the consul was the victim of predation, responsibility for warehousing the items seized from his place of residence, bizarrely, was often assigned to the consul himself.

— Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail (Page 203)

Even seemingly innocuous objects were worth something. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand why, in Marseille in the year 1331, a man named Peire de Sepeda should have chosen to make good on a debt by invading the home of his debtor and removing, of all things, a tablecloth and two napkins. There is always the possibility, of course, that the debtor, Antoni de Serra, was eating off them at the time of the home invasion: the record carefully specifies that the tablecloth was on the table when Peire seized it. In this case, the value of the linens may have been incidental to the insult delivered by their seizure.

— Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail (Page 144 - 145)