Medieval readership shaped which polemical works on Islam survived and spread.

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to how audience taste, not scholarly quality, drives what gets preserved and canonized — parallels the manuscript-collector autonomy point from The Library: A Fragile History where print ended readers’ bespoke compilation.
• DEEPTHINKING: A striking inversion: the most accurate texts on Islam in medieval Europe were the least read, while the most distorted were the most popular — the ‘public’ as final editorial selector decides what survives for later scholarship, meaning the historical record itself is shaped by the desire for easy entertainment.

Related

• Medieval Christians preferred entertaining, ridiculable portraits of Islam over accurate information about it (similarity 0.89)
• Medieval anti-Islamic polemic circulated as a living shared tradition (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval audiences preferred Islam accounts easier to ridicule over accurate ones (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval readers preferred Muslim legendary material they could ridicule over the Quran itself (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval disputation records were largely constructed strawman debates (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Christian readers preferred easily ridiculed Islamic legends over the faithful Qur’an translation. (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval writers ignored Islamic ritual because praising it served no polemic purpose (similarity 0.78)
• Later polemicists distorted early scholarly accounts of Islam for propaganda purposes (similarity 0.78)