Medievalish 4.6
In Praise of the Catalog
Dear friend,
The subtitle may be confusing. In praise of the catalog? One wonders if Grace Hamman is super into Sears. The answer is no, although in middle school I was deeply attached to a pale green nightgown ordered from the Land’s End catalog.1
But by catalog, I mean the literary device. The catalog is perhaps the most deceptively simple of the literary devices, for all it entails is a list, of things, or people, or places. You can basically catalog anything. Homer catalogued ships in The Iliad; Ovid catalogued dogs in Metamorphoses. In the renewal of epic poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Milton catalogued the demons in Paradise Lost and Spenser catalogued trees in The Faerie Queene. But you don’t have to be writing epic poetry to deploy the catalog. Shel Silverstein’s Eighteen Flavors, a catalog of ice cream flavors from the delightful Where the Sidewalk Ends, comes to mind:
Eighteen luscious, scrumptious flavors— Chocolate, lime and cherry, Coffee, pumpkin, fudge-banana, Caramel cream and boysenberry, Rocky road and toasted almond, Butterscotch, vanilla dip, Butter-brickle, apple ripple, Coconut and mocha chip, Brandy peach and lemon custard, Each scoop lovely, smooth, and round, Tallest ice-cream cone in town, Lying there (sniff) on the ground.
A tragic catalog rather than an epic!
Or in the eternally cited example, Gerard Manley Hopkin’s Pied Beauty, a stunning list of variegated, freckled and spotted that becomes a paean of praise to the Creator God:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. Worth reading aloud.
I began thinking more seriously about the catalog as literary device after my experience of reading the early modern priest and poet, Thomas Traherne (d. 1674). I love Traherne. Traherne never met a list he didn’t like. In fact, most of his work could be described as an elaborate catalog—a list of creation, or things to be thankful for, or a sequence of meditations on God’s gifts. In the Fortieth Meditation of the Third Century, he writes of the “World of Joy” he discovers in studying at the University:
I saw that there were Things in this World of which I never Dreamed, Glorious Secrets, and Glorious Persons past Imagination. There I saw that Logick, Ethicks, Physicks, Metaphysicks, Geometry, Astronomy, Poesie, Medicine, Grammer, Musick, Rhetorick, all kinds of Arts Trades and Mechanicismes that Adorned the World pertained to felicity. …There I saw into the Nature of the Sea, the Heavens, the Sun, the Moon and Stars, the Elements, Minerals, and Vegetables. All which appeared like the Kings Daughter, all glorious within, and those Things which my Nurses and Parents should hav talkt of, there were taught unto me.2
Traherne’s list—one of so many within the Centuries—is meant to stagger, to dazzle. Traherne takes this opening up of the gift of the World as reflection of the ever-giving character of God. Study the world in such a way that feeds us “with nobility and Goodness towards men” and obliges us to “lov Him.”
Summer is the seasonal equivalent of the catalog. It is the time of plants upon plants upon plants—I just planted a bed of drought-resistant flowers for the first time by myself in our front yard, and I couldn’t be more pleased with them (or myself, ha!). Summer preaches abundance upon abundance, even if it is in the weeds as well. A catalog makes this clear. Here is my own incomplete catalog of my yard: Tomato, thyme, and rosemary; squashes on their way to being golden and green; pumpkin great and tiny, yellow and orange and white and red; succulents spiky or smooth, purpling or pale; penstemon and peonies and pansies and petunias and pine.
Pentecost is the liturgical equivalent of the catalog. I was struck at church this week by the piling abundance of Pentecost. The fire is poured out, and every language spoken, meeting every person in their own homely tongue, making the scattering of Babel into greater and more diverse joy than ever before. God is not stingy with his gifts; he pours them out indiscriminately, joyfully, in variegated color and shape and scale and size. List them—you won’t stop.
The affinity between summer, the catalog, the bounty of the Holy Spirit, creator mundi, makes me think the catalog is my summer invitation. The catalog beckons us to reject the temptation of grasping scarcity in how we love others, how we worship, how we imitate God. Study the abundance of the warm season and take it as a sermon. Make list after list after list. Catalog it. For in the almost foolishly simple catalog, numinous awe can flower forth like the creatures in the list.
What I’ve been up to this month:
Writing! Perhaps my favorite stage, when no one knows what you’re up to and you *could* be writing an effervescent masterpiece, or you could be writing a nothing burger that never sees the light of day. The possibilities are endless! I love it.
Old Books with Grace wrapped up its fifth season (!). Catch it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. I was going to do one more episode and then forgot about how incredibly intense May can be, so I decided to let it be until the fall.
Taking a break from social media for summer focus.
What I’ve been reading this month:
Nonfiction: Ramie Targoff’s fascinating Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance. A marvelous biography of four Early Modern women writers.
Fiction: Nothing worth recommending, alas. Some months are like that, I suppose.
Medieval/Medieval-adjacent: Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection
Article: “Waiting for Pentecost with Mary,” by Kathleen Mulhern over at Plough
A Prayer from the Past
I looked at a tiny, darling fifteenth-century Book of Hours in the British Library last month, Egerton MS 3883. I was moved by a prayer in Middle English added to the back of the manuscript, signed by a scribe named Chetwyn. See first the Middle English, then my translation.
But gode lord thou knowest wel myn hert is right feble. Moche is myn unstabelness. Therefore gode God strenthe me. Stabul me. Teche me.
Good Lord, you know well that my heart is very feeble. Much is my instability. Therefore, good God, strengthen me. Stabilize me. Teach me.
Amen.
Peace for your June,
Grace
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It washed me out so badly I looked like a sickly Victorian child climbing into bed each night. Appropriate, because I was very into novels about sickly Victorian children anyway.
I use the edition of the Centuries edited by Anne Ridler (Oxford University Press, 1966).
This is delightful. There is nothing better than a list. What are the days of creation other than God’s to-do list. Check. Good. Check. Good. Etc. Augustine said God created the entire world simultaneously but expressed it as a list for the sake of our ease in understanding.
If you need a fiction win, might I recommend The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (1949)? It's a seven deadly sins allegory, so a bit of a catalog (but you have to figure out who's who), and it's set on the Cornish coast in the summer. It got me out of a fiction slump earlier this year, fresh as a sea breeze!