Colonial exploration expanded monster-making rather than dispelling it with science

Evidence

The end of the Middle Ages, rather than resulting in a reduction in monsters, opened the door to all kinds of “scientific” studies of miraculous creatures living on newly discovered islands and continents. Fantasies about giants, Amazons, and others were fairly common, and while these subjects will be examined more fully in the subsequent chapters, it is important to say something here about the new opportunities for monster-making. When Europeans encountered these new territories, their imaginations went into overdrive; thus during the Age of Exploration numerous monsters were purportedly observed in the Americas, the South Pacific, and other colonial spaces. This began with the sighting of islands in the Americas and the South Pacific, places that inspired a sense of mystery and wonder. For the European, “the unknown island is conceived as a self-contained possible world for the colonial imagination, a place where anything unexpected can happen.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘fear without object’ thesis — the European imagined monsters in islands before even landing on them, image preceding contact.
• SEED: An essay angle: colonization as a monster-manufacturing industry — how ‘discovery’ actually produced projected monsters, not discovered facts.