Saracens, demons & Jews : making monsters in Medieval art
"During the crusades, Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols were branded enemies of the Christian majority. Illustrated with strikingly imaginative and still disturbing images, this book reveals the outrageously pejorative ways these rejected social groups were represented--often as monsters, demons, or freaks of nature. Such monstrous images of non-Christians were not rare displays but a routine aspect of medieval public and private life. These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry. Debra Higgs Strickland introduces and decodes images of the "monstrous races," from demonlike Jews and man-eating Tartars to Saracens with dog heads or animal bodies. Strickland traces the origins of the negative pictorial code used to portray monsters, demons, and non-Christian peoples to pseudoscientific theories of astrology, climate, and physiognomy, some dating back to classical times. She also considers the code in light of contemporary Christian eschatological beliefs and concepts of monstrosity and rejection."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2003
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., ©2003
336 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 27 cm
9780691057194, 0691057192
49736841
Making men known by sight: classical theories, monstrous races, & sin
Demons, darkness, & Ethiopians
Christians imagine Jews
Saracens, tartars, & other crusader fantasies
Eschatological conspiracies
Conclusions: what is a monster?