Medieval Christians imagined demons prowling everywhere, even often disguised as dark-skinned foreigners

Evidence

The imagination functioned as a dominant source of knowledge, and fantasies about monsters, strange lands, and other chimeras constituted a weighty part of the early formulation of the Muslim characters examined in the following pages. This medieval reckoning employed the imaginative medieval narrative, which was “carried in images, stories, and legends.” A belief in monsters was one of the “stock features of the occidental mentality,” and this figured prominently in the narratives that shaped people’s lives. For medieval Christians, monsters, demons, and all manner of fantastic creatures occupied the same world as humans. Typically, there was no separation of the human community and the world of the fantastic and the horrible, and this resulted in a constant and intense anxiety about Satan and other creatures, who could attack at any moment. Medieval Christians believed that “demons were everywhere ready to attack the souls and bodies of the unwary,” a fear that contributed to a “terror of all mental conceptions.” This thinking created a world that was much like the modern horror film—terror was around every corner, in every glen, living in the forest, the cave, and the lake. Even the local church was not safe, as demons were observed to walk through the halls of sanctified spaces, often in the guise of a dark-skinned foreigner. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 91

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘demons in the church disguised as dark-skinned foreigners’ detail is a striking image supporting the thesis that the Muslim monster figure was manufactured from pure imagination before contact.