Why read Saracens, Demons & Jews?

Book cover of Saracens, Demons & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Saracens, Demons & Jews as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Asa Simon Mittman

Author

This one is the closest to my own areas of research. Strickland and I are both medieval art historians interested in how images not only reflect cultural ideas about othered peoples and the production of otherness, but also how images are central to the generation of these ideas. In this well-illustrated book, she examines a wide range of medieval Christian images that demonize groups—particularly Jews and Muslims, but really, all those who were not normative European Christians. I’ve returned to this book’s arguments many times over the years, and every time, I learn something anew.

From Asa's list on explaining the history of monsters.