Elizabethan English pub signs depicted Saracens as monstrous, non-human beasts.
Evidence
Business signage for pubs, coffeehouses, and tobacco houses often displayed a Turk, Saracen, or Blackamoor (“Black Moor”) wearing a turban and brandishing a scimitar. Modern renderings of these signs are still used, typically at pubs and restaurants in Great Britain, such as the one at Waltham Abbey. These more recent renditions are tame in comparison to the extinct signs of Elizabethan England, which included portrayals of the Turk, Saracen, and Blackamoor as a monster. Written sources provide clues about what Elizabethan-era renderings of monstrous Saracens, Turks, and Moors looked like. One source describes an image of a Saracen in the following manner: “[he had] a Sarazins face, his nose too long for his lips, his cheeks like the jawes of a horse, his eyes like a Smithes forge.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 323
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis on manufactured Muslim monsters — this is visual/concrete evidence of image preceding interaction.
Related
- Elizabethan commercial signage portrayed Muslim figures as monstrous, horse-jawed faces (similarity 0.94)
- Saracen, Turk, and Moor were interchangeable signifiers for the Muslim enemy. (similarity 0.80)
- Theater and painting rendered Muslim faces from an identical mold as Satan’s (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval tales showed Saracens becoming human only by converting and turning white. (similarity 0.79)
- Dark-skinned Muslim monsters carried African anxieties into modern imaginaries (similarity 0.78)