Medieval anti-Islamic polemic worked through fact curation rather than argument

Evidence

It is curious that Peter the Venerable’s own polemic was not associated with the main corpus in the manuscripts, or, consequently, by Bibliander; this may be the result of accident, but it suggests, as did Vincent’s treatment of Peter of Toledo’s Risalah text, that the European public was more interested in facts about Muhammad and Islam than in argued polemic. It seems probable that in some writers’ eyes the great polemic lay in the selection, arrangement and presentation of supposedly factual material, rather than in such argumentation as Peter the Venerable, for example, based upon it. Ratiocination might be superfluous, even distracting, when a selection of facts — allegations — could be relied on to induce the desired reaction in the mind of the reader. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1302

This omission of all the passages of argument, which the quotation of factual matter was intended in the original to illustrate, completed the process by which the historical facts were divorced from their contexts. It implies without room for doubt that Vincent sought facts rather than arguments, but facts useful for polemic. … We can only say that he collected information about Islam which might be useful in attacking it, without noticeable care for consistency, and that he ignored theoretic disputation; his approach was scientific, in that he sought interesting facts; if his intention was partly polemic, his method was based upon historical assertions about events and not upon abstract argument. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1292

It seems probable that in some writers’ eyes the great polemic lay in the selection, arrangement and presentation of supposedly factual material, rather than in such argumentation as Peter the Venerable, for example, based upon it. Ratiocination might be superfluous, even distracting, when a selection of facts — allegations — could be relied on to induce the desired reaction in the mind of the reader. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1302

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how curation and selective presentation have always been the real machinery of persuasion, with fact-as-allegation doing the rhetorical work that explicit argument supposedly does.
• XREF: Connects to the general theme of editorial curation as rhetorical power — that selection and framing substitute for direct argument. — connects to: Medieval Christians weaponized accurate Islamic learning for polemics; Medieval anti-Islamic polemic circulated as a living shared tradition; Medieval disputation records were largely constructed strawman debates (+9 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘facts useful for polemic, divorced from their contexts’ description is a compact mechanism statement that generalizes far beyond medieval anti-Islam texts to modern epistemic weaponization of selected fact.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1302; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1292