Renaissance monster tales continued to be associated specifically with Muslim territories

Evidence

In Elizabethan drama and other genres of contemporaneous literature, we see this in the “monsters and other wonders [that] were so important in Renaissance literature.” Monsters were not limited to the New World or Oceania, however. Encounters with the monstrous races and creatures that lived in the East continued to occupy the European imaginaire. Andre Thevet’s description of a Red Sea “monster of the size and proportion of a tiger without a tail, but [with] the face of a well-formed man” is but one example of the human-animal hybrids that continued to be associated with Muslim territories. Turks figure prominently in these stories of monsters, due to the many geographical spaces they occupied as well as the threat that Ottoman power posed to the Europeans. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 237

Categorization

• SEED: Thevet’s Red Sea man-faced tiger-monster is a concrete specimen for an essay on how human-animal hybrids were geographically pinned to Muslim lands.
• XREF: Directly feeds the monster/demon/giant taxonomy the reader is tracking — here a new species, the human-animal hybrid, carries geopolitical (Ottoman threat) anxiety.