Over the past 35 years, there has been a shift from seeing the medieval as the parent civilization of Western modernity to exposing a more "vivid and disturbing" Middle Ages. One area of scholarship is medieval monster-making, seen in the work of medievalists and art historians like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, John Tolan, Michael Camille, and Debra Higgs Strickland. Whereas the Middle Ages is for some the foundation for modernity, for others it is viewed as "the quintessential 'other' " from which modernity differentiates itself. One of the arguments I make, which is supported by this claim, is that medieval notions of alterity continue to impact the ways in which the West thinks about Islam and her followers. Nickolas Haydock calls this the Saracen doxology: "The medieval portrait of the Saracen in general and of Mohammed in particular survives humanism, continues largely unabated through the Enlightenment, gains renewed and altered vigor during the nineteenth-century revival of chivalry and medievalism, and continues to surface unabashedly across Western culture today." The Middle Ages is the era in which anti-Muslim rhetoric is founded, later to be resurrected by the Gothic movement and sustained and legitimized by Orientalism.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the argument that medieval frameworks of alterity underpin modern Western views of Islam.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 76