Medieval fear and anxiety intensified after the fourteenth century’s catastrophes.
Evidence
- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 99. In Taylor’s reading of history, the Middle Ages is predominantly an age of anxiety and fear, which become heightened after the fourteenth century and its famines, wars, and plague (p. 88). — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 791
Categorization
- XREF: Relevant to the reader’s core mechanism: fear finds a manufactured object — the monster image fills pre-existing medieval anxiety. The monster as container for ambient collective fear.