Marginal monsters in Christian art encoded non-Christians as sinful outsiders

Evidence

In painting and architecture, bizarre creatures often lurk on the edges in psalters and bibles and in the corners of churches and cathedrals. In the Middle Ages, these figures functioned as “moralizations of sinfulness,” and in the schema of monsters, as “extreme examples of the caricatured bodies that were used more generally to represent non-Christians and heretics.” Many religious manuscripts were populated with strange creatures, at times holding up a letter or a word. In the Canterbury Psalter, a horned creature stands in the text, holding up a letter. In other cases, monstrous races float on the edges—symbols of the outsider status of Saracens, Africans, and other non-Christians. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 118

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s guiding question about monster/demon/giant figures as containers for Western anxiety — the marginalized, edge-positioned grotesque.
• QUESTION: What does the visual placement ‘on the edges’ versus ‘at the center’ reveal about the social function of the monster figure?