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But another remarkable work in Old French, almost contemporary to du Pont's Romance, offers a sharp contrast to this critical portrait of Muhammad. In fact the Book of Muhammad's Ladder (also extant in a Latin version, which appeared anonymously in 1264) is derived from Islamic accounts and told from a Muslim point of view.3

Muhammad's Ladder tells the story of the Prophet's night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and thence his ascent to God's throne. Here Muhammad speaks in the first person of his journey on the fabulous mount al-BurÂq and his face-to-face encounter with God. Upon reaching the highest heaven, having passed the prophet Jesus in the first heaven, Muhammad relates:

When I, Muhammad, saw that I was alone, since Gabriel had left me, I took strength and courage in love of God. … When I came near [the Throne], I heard a voice say to me: "Approach me, my friend Muhammad. … Know, Muhammad, that I consider you the most honored of all the messengers and the highest of all the creatures and angels and men and demons which I made."

It should be noted, however, the translator of the Book of Muhammad's Ladder justifies his presentation of Islamic material by noting that readers will recognize Muhammad as a fraud when they "become acquainted with the errors and unbelievable things that he recounts in this book."

Scholars such as Miguel Asin Palacios and Maria Rosa Menocal have maintained that Dante Alighieri composed his Divine Comedy as a Christian imitation of and response to this very work. Muhammad, of course, finds an unhappy place in the first part of Dante's brilliant poem. In the bowels of hell Muhammad suffers with his cousin and son-in-law Ali, both "cleft in the face from chin to forelock," a fitting punishment, in Dante's view, for those who cleft Holy Mother Church with their heretical teachings.

Muhammad's earliest appearance in English literature is hardly more elevated. In his historical poem, Fall of Princes (1438), John Lydgate includes a chapter "Off Machomet the fals prophete." In Lydgate's account "this Machomet, this cursid fals man," was neither prophet nor monotheist, but "he koude riht weel flatre and lie" (he could flatter and lie well). Lydgate repeats many of the same accusations that appear in earlier polemics; again Muhammad is an epileptic who beguiled his followers with chicanery while privately engaging in debauchery. This was his ultimate doom, for he "Lik a glotoun deied in dronkenesse … Fill [fell] in a podel, deuoured among swyn [swine]."

Yet even as Lydgate retailed such crude stuff, Christians were beginning to study Islam firsthand. The impetus came with the rise of the Franciscan and Dominican missions to the Islamic world. St. Francis Assisi visited the court of the Egyptian Sultan; Raymond Lull was martyred in North Africa. The effect of this new movement is evident in the Summa Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas, who was in contact with Dominican missionaries in Syria, but its fruition would not be seen until the Enlightenment.

In Enlightenment writings, Muhammad is depicted not only with reasonable accuracy but also with surprising favor—in part because many leading Enlightenment figures sought alternatives to orthodox Christianity. At the outset of the eighteenth century, Leibniz, in his Theodizee (1710), praised Muhammad for preaching a "natural" religion. In 1756, Voltaire published his massive Essai sur les moeurs, which includes a chapter "de l'Arabie et de Mahomet."

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