ABSTRACT
Ever since the publication of Orientalism, medievalists and early modernists alike have attempted to apply Edward Said’s thesis, namely that the history of Western involvement in the Orient colors relations between East and West “almost since the time of Homer,” to their respective areas of study.1 Although some have emphasized the nuanced and complex representations of Islam in Latin Christendom, many others have been tempted to connect modern prejudices about Islam to the medieval past. In contrast to this approach, I argue in the following pages that there existed a plurality of images or portrayals of Islam and Muslims in the Middle Ages, ones that differed from modern depictions of the Muslim world and that were not exclusively negative. Moreover, I claim that even negative medieval depictions of Muslims are rooted in religious opposition to and fear of Islam, a sentiment very different from modern racial prejudices inherited from eighteenth-and nineteenth-century colonialism. After a brief section discussing the most important studies on the subject of the medieval representation of Islam, I contend this twofold claim by focusing on the medieval literary motifs of the converted Saracen princess and the Saracen knight, characters that reveal the complex and nuanced manner with which medieval European authors and their audiences approached Islam.
