Looking Like a Lollard

Abstract

ABSTRACT The increasing emphasis on ocular communion in the later Middle Ages highlighted the paradox that attended the Eucharistic miracle—that, at the elevation of the host, one is looking at the body of Christ, but seeing only a piece of bread. Understandably, this inability to apprehend the transformation of the bread into the body led some to question whether anything miraculous occurred. The Church’s response was to provide conversion narratives in which unbelievers were granted visions of the host transformed into bleeding flesh. But these stories failed to resolve the disjunction between looking and seeing because (as with the Eucharistic miracle) they relied on the belief that they were true rather than any sensual apprehension. Needing to provide lay churchgoers with something to behold, the ecclesiastical authorities pivoted from the establishment of belief to the detection of disbelief, and trained the gaze of the congregation on something it could see—the unbelievers who failed to reverence the host and thus looked like Lollards.