In painting and architecture, bizarre creatures often lurk on the edges in psalters and bibles and in the corners of churches and cathedrals. In the Middle Ages, these figures functioned as "moralizations of sinfulness," and in the schema of monsters, as "extreme examples of the caricatured bodies that were used more generally to represent non-Christians and heretics." Many religious manuscripts were populated with strange creatures, at times holding up a letter or a word. In the Canterbury Psalter, a horned creature stands in the text, holding up a letter. In other cases, monstrous races float on the edges—symbols of the outsider status of Saracens, Africans, and other non-Christians.

XREF: Connects to medieval art history and how visual marginalia encoded religious and social hierarchy — the outsider's place at the literal edge of the page mirrors its marginal status in society.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 118