Medieval tales of Muslim cannibalism encoded Christian anxieties about resurrection and bodily corruption

Evidence

Medieval images of demons and monsters often feature the consumption of humans, typically in portrayals that show the dismemberment of Christians in some gruesome fashion. The fear of being consumed and ingested by the enemy is situated in medieval Christian beliefs surrounding the body of the saint, who, after Christ, functioned as the dominant symbol of resurrection through literary and visual media that communicated “potent fantasies of violent dismemberment and reintegration.” In accounts of Christian travels in the Holy Land, the fear of bodily corruption was expressed in the Saracen monster, a figure that often enjoyed eating Christian flesh. These stories and images formulated the fantasies of Muslim cannibalism: “United by the appropriation of a metaphor, these writers deploy images of anatomical mutilation to symbolize mutilated subjectivities, identities whose borders have been unmade.” Death through the consumption of the body by an enemy was a way to remind medieval Christians of the promise of resurrection. Carolyn Bynum explains the Hell-Mouth, which consumed Christian bodies, in this way: “damnation is eternal swallowing and digestion; eternal partition; the mouth of hell is a real mouth; second, final death is mastication… redemption therefore is triumph over fragmentation, digestion, and rot.” Only resurrection, which was exclusive to Christians, would restore the body to its original state. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 175

Categorization

• XREF: Ties the reader’s monster-figure thread to Carolyn Bynum’s work on medieval body theology; also links to resurrection doctrine that recurs across Western Christian anti-Muslim imagery.
• SEED: An angle: how the cannibal accusation projects the accuser’s own theological terror of bodily fragmentation onto the enemy — fear without an object.