English faculty psychology theorized how fantasy became internalized as reality about Muslims

Evidence

As in the Middle Ages, Muslims in the Renaissance were viewed as creatures alienated from God, a fact demonstrated in the monstrous races featured in Shakespearean-era dramas. The role of imagination is a critical part of this story. The English had a particularly astute understanding of how this faculty functioned in relation to the mind; in fact, this understanding bears an uncanny resemblance to Bourdieu’s concern with fantasy masquerading as reality. According to this view, “[a] lways the imagination of fantasy is seen as a power operating in a framework of other faculties and functions. In a definite hierarchical order of communication, knowledge travels from the so-called ‘outer’ senses (the five primary senses), to the ‘inner’ (Common Sense, Imagination and/or Fantasy, Sensible Reason, and Memory, which occupy cells in the brain), and thus to the highest rational, incorporeal powers (the Intellect or Wit or Understanding, and the Will).” The internalization of fantasies about Jews and Muslims depended upon “the transmission of data through a hierarchy of powers.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 238

Categorization

• XREF: This is the psychological machinery behind the reader’s core ‘manufactured image’ thesis — the medieval faculty psychology that explains HOW the monstrous image got internalized before contact.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Bourdieu’s ‘fantasy masquerading as reality’ as a framework for the whole book’s thesis — the author only gestures at it here.
• DEEPTHINKING: The hierarchy-of-powers model is a genuinely revealing medieval theory of how received fantasy beats direct sense evidence — dense and paradigm-shifting for the reader’s thesis.