Pre-modern monsters were geographically contained while Saracens inhabited sunless evil lands

Evidence

The differences between pre-modern and modern monsters are numerous, and in some ways can be understood best through the series of transformations that occur in modernity. Charles Taylor has described this as a transition between enchantment and disenchantment, “the shift from symbol to mechanism.” Modernity’s encounter with monsters profoundly changed the way these creatures function, through “Gothic mobility.” In pre-modernity, monsters—whether located inside or outside a territory’s borders—were often restricted to the spaces that exist beyond the borders of a community or the “natural world.” On medieval maps, the Plinian monstrous races are located in a region that lies south of Africa. … In contrast, Christian encounters with Saracens often took place in Muslim territories, evil places where the sun was absent and every rock and stone was black. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 55

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the geographic-topological taxonomy of monsters: Plinian races south of Africa, Jews in hell-dwellings below Christian communities, Saracens in their own sunless territories.
• XREF: The ‘evil places where the sun was absent’ trope connects to the reader’s interest in theology/art manufacturing the monstrous — and to the blackening of soil/rocks as moral geography.