The pig-death slander on Muhammad circulated across English, Hebrew, and chronicle texts

Evidence

John Lydgate, in his Fall of Princes, recounts the standard litany of Muhammad’s bogus miracles, followed by epileptic fits and death at the hands (or rather snouts) of pigs (Paull, “Figure of Mahomet in Middle English Literature,” 191-95). Other texts tell essentially the same story: William Langland’s Piers Plowman and Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, 6:14-51 (a world chronicle of early fourteenth century, translated into English by Trevisa in the late fourteenth century; see Metlitzki, Matter of Araby in Medieval England, 198-99, 205-6). Even the fourteenth-century Hebrew anti-Christian work the Nizzahon vetus says that the Muslims worship Muhammad and that Muhammad died by falling drunk onto a garbage heap and being devoured by pigs (Nizzahon vetus, ed. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1784

Categorization

• XREF: Genealogically grounds the anti-Islam tropes mapped in Anidjar/Aziz/Razack vault claims by showing the pig-epilepsy slander template recurs even in a Hebrew anti-Christian polemic.
• CANDY: That Jewish-Christian polemic and Christian polemic converge on inventing the same grotesque Muhammad death is a striking elevatorconversation fact.
• QUESTION: Why does the pig-devouring death recur across Latin, vernacular, and Hebrew sources? What does its cross-confessional spread imply about a shared medieval anti-Islam repertoire vs. independent invention?