Latin treatments of Islam recycled errors for generations once a scholar got things wrong.

Evidence

Her work was revolutionary, and Monneret de Villard was unfortunate enough to publish his books too early to benefit from it. Much that he says, not only in the book to which I have referred, but also in his study devoted to Ricoldo, is in consequence outdated. Miss d’Alverny incidentally cleared away a number of accumulated misconceptions, which dated from Pére Mandonnet’s pioneer work upon the subject, and which Monneret de Villard did not tackle, helping, indeed, to perpetuate them. The idea that the summula (part of the Cluniac corpus) could be a translation from an Arabic original was natural in a scholar who was in no sense an orientalist, as was the case with Mandonnet; but no one could have maintained it who had any knowledge of the East and gave it any attention at all. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 87

Categorization

• SEED: The endurance of scholarly errors about Islam passed uncritically from writer to writer suggests a mini-essay on how misinformation about Islam reproduces precisely through academic bibliographic chains, a medieval precursor to modern orientalist echo chambers.
• XREF: The point that even hostile-but-scholarly observers like Mandonnet held the corpus to be Arabic-derived fits Aziz/Razack’s theme of ‘Islam’ content being authored by outsiders yet claimed as authentic.