Explorers read medieval romance monsters directly into the Americas.

Evidence

Columbus claims to have witnessed, “men with one eye only, and others with faces that were man-eaters, accustomed upon taking a prisoner to cut his throat, drink his blood and dismember him.” This landscape was occupied with Plinian monsters, demon-worshippers, Amazons, a race of humanoid creatures with tails, and dragons. A dragon was reportedly killed by a gallant (explorer) knight in one of numerous tales about the Americas that was modeled upon medieval romances, which are stories, as we well know, populated with Muslim monsters. The importance of chivalry is reflected in the journals of numerous explorers, an example of the medieval episteme that framed colonial adventures. Giants, another type of monster featured in medieval tales of chivalry, were spotted in Brazil and Patagonia during the sixteenth century. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 581

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the ‘fear without an object’ thesis — the monster template predates the encounter and is simply projected onto the New World, as the reader is tracking across this book.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Medieval romance as the first colonial lens’ — how a literary genre supplied the categories through which entire continents were interpreted and conquered.