In the Middle Ages, there was an identification between the page (or canvas) and the body, inscribing human bodies with meaning. As one fellow scholar puts it, "[l] iterary production takes place on bodies." This made human subjects the "conveyors of words or, more generally, signs." During the medieval period, Jewish, Muslim, and African bodies functioned as signs of Satan, demons, monsters, sin, and monstrosity within a system of meaning that continued to be in force in the Renaissance and later centuries. We see these signs in medieval texts and drawings, dramas such as Othello, great works of art, and later in the fiction of Romanticism and Gothic horror, the travel journals of explorers, board games, dime-store novels, and the movies.

XREF: Connects to literary studies of race in Othello and Gothic fiction, and to how racial signs migrated from medieval theology into later cultural forms. QUESTION: What specific medieval texts and drawings codified this identification, and how did the system persist into modern media?

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 748