appearance in public was without significance because 
     they had no ability to participate in the life of the city.

     The Liturgical Piety  of Louis Bouyer considers the later 
Middle Ages to have been quite decadent liturgically and to 
have already begun the translation of corporate prayer and 
worship into those visual terms that are so inseparable from 
Gutenberg technology. On page 16, we read:

          Dom Herwegen’s ideas on this point greatly shocked 
     most of his early readers. But it must be admitted today 
     that the whole tendency of contemporary research tends 
     to bear out his conclusions, and to prove them even more 
     convincingly than, perhaps, he himself would have 
     expected. In the greatest scholarly work of our times on 
     the history of the Roman Mass, Jungmann’s Missarum