Medieval images of demons and monsters often feature the consumption of humans, typically in portrayals that show the dismemberment of Christians in some gruesome fashion. The fear of being consumed and ingested by the enemy is situated in medieval Christian beliefs surrounding the body of the saint, who, after Christ, functioned as the dominant symbol of resurrection through literary and visual media that communicated "potent fantasies of violent dismemberment and reintegration." In accounts of Christian travels in the Holy Land, the fear of bodily corruption was expressed in the Saracen monster, a figure that often enjoyed eating Christian flesh. These stories and images formulated the fantasies of Muslim cannibalism: "United by the appropriation of a metaphor, these writers deploy images of anatomical mutilation to symbolize mutilated subjectivities, identities whose borders have been unmade."

XREF: Connects to theories of dehumanization of enemies through projected violence, relevant to colonial and orientalist discourse studies.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 175