Medieval Christians preferred entertaining, ridiculable portraits of Islam over accurate information about it

Evidence

The ultimate editorial selection was made by the general public. Some of the works on Islam which from a modern point of view are most admirable had a very restricted circulation. … Readers, even serious readers, were shy of the more serious works, and preferred to be amused as well as edified. Sources of sound information which did receive a wide circulation were Pedro de Alfonso, who was often quoted upon the subject of Islam, apart from the circulation of his Dzalogz whole; the Risalah, in its different forms, and extracts from Tripoli; we may add the Cluniac translations and the Liber Scalae. Except for Pedro, whose work belonged primarily to anti-Judaic polemic literature, the popularity of a few works must have been due to their providing the easy reading matter about Islam that their public sought. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1304

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault cluster (Anidjar, Aziz, Razack) on how ‘Islam’ as a category is constituted through the West’s knowledge practices; here the mechanism is medieval manuscript circulation selecting for the easily-ridiculed.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: contra modern assumptions that scholarship about ‘accurate’ information about Islam naturally wins audiences, the medieval record shows audiences select for entertaining distortion — parallel to contemporary media economics of Islam coverage.