Classical Plinian monster categories were recycled onto medieval Saracens and Jews

Evidence

Medieval monsters were created along the contours of the Classical imagination, which is why we find early Muslims, often called Saracens, depicted alongside Plinian creatures including Blemmyae, Amazons, Cyclops, Panotii, and Ephiphagus, creatures that often regenerated as new monsters in the modern period. One example is the cynocephalus, a dog-headed man that dates from the Classical period and was identified as a Jewish and Muslim monster in the Middle Ages. … Jews, Europe’s internal enemies, were often conflated with Saracens and other foreigners despite their location within, or on the edges of, European communities. Identity was often shaped by ethnogenesis—a sense of origins situated in a limited understanding of geography that dominated much of the Middle Ages. Mythologies of a Jewish-Muslim conspiracy against Christendom abounded in claims of Jewish mosques and Muslim synagogues, in the paintings of Jews and Saracens crucifying the Son of God, and in plays depicting Christian narratives, including the Crucifixion and the Assumption of Mary, that were performed through the end of the Renaissance. Although these depictions do not represent monsters, they are included because of their contribution to the idea of the Muslim as a monstrous character. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core thesis that the monster image precedes contact and was manufactured from inherited Classical categories, linking theology, geography (ethnogenesis), and visual art into one system.
• DEFINE: Introduces cynocephalus and the analytical category of ethnogenesis as limited-geographic identity formation.