Bernard of Clairvaux and the European Christians of the Middle Ages lived in a paradox: they were on the edges of the physical world, but at the center of the spiritual one they imagined. By their geographic distance from the centers of the faith, they might have considered themselves aligned with the fantastic creatures and monsters at the other edges of the map. Instead, however, they rewrote the world and story of scripture to put themselves at the center: to make themselves the people aligned with the locations, stories, and significance of the biblical text. In the process of doing so, though, they remade the cultures and peoples of the actual Jerusalem and Middle East into their own image, turning the actual residents of those places into “others” on the edge of the map.