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)