Medieval writers kept discredited anti-Muslim stories alongside accurate claims

Evidence

Vitry, in different parts of his history, repeated stories based on the imputation of idolatry to Muslims, which were quite inconsistent with his own substantially clear and accurate statements of Islamic belief. Both Varagine and Higden quoted stories that they explicitly realised were irreconcilable; for themselves, they preferred the better, but, as was the custom in such cases, they retained the discredited passages in their texts. As a general rule, there is a wide gap between the most sensible and the least sensible story in a single text. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1296

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the vault thread: shows a pre-modern mechanism by which demonizing fabrications about Islam persisted and circulated regardless of authors’ better knowledge — the ‘retain the discredited’ habit as an infrastructure of the constitutive outside.