'Deceptive Birdlime, Baleful Happiness, False Joy'

Catalogs and lists in poetry and prose generally come in two inflections -- celebratory and comic – but the writer's intent can be murky or intentionally ambiguous. In an 1818 letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, Keats writes: “[B]y the by you may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county.” The poet revels in meteorological misery. Robert Burton, a great favorite of Keats’ and another reveler, packed thousands of lists into The Anatomy of Melancholy, sometimes starting one before completing the one he’s already working on:

“To see sub exuviis leonis onagrum, a filthy loathsome carcass, a Gorgon’s head puffed up by parasites, assume this unto himself, glorious titles, in worth an infant, a Cuman ass, a painted sepulchre, an Egyptian temple? To see a withered face, a diseased, deformed, cankered complexion, a rotten carcass, a viperous mind, and Epicurean soul set out with orient pearls, jewels, diadems, perfumes, curious elaborate works, as proud of his clothes as a child of his new coats [and so on for another sixty-one words and three catalogs for the rest of the paragraph].”

Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) was a leader of the Italian humanist awakening in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. He served as chancellor of the Florentine Republic and was author of On the World and Religious Life (pub. c. 1381; trans. Tina Marshall, 2014). Books in the I Tatti Renaissance Library series, published by Harvard University Press, are beautiful to look at, hold and read. English translation on the right faces the Latin original on the left. Before I started reading this volume I had never heard of Salutati. He too is a master of the literary catalog two centuries before Burton.

The book was written for a friend of Salutati’s, Niccolò Lapi of Uzzano, a lawyer who left secular life to enter the Camaldulensian monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence. Lapi asked him to write a treatise supporting his decision and encouraging him to persevere in his monastic rigors. In his introduction to the volume, Ronald G. Witt notes that the medieval strain in Salutati’s thought sometimes verges on the Manichean, as in this epical list:

“The world, then, is the most unwholesome hold of turpitude, deceptive birdlime, baleful happiness, false joy, empty exultation, a threshing floor of tribulations, a pit of miseries, shipwreck of virtues, kindling for evils, incitement to crime, a blind journey, a rugged path, a ravine of plots, a horrible prison, a stage of iniquities, an arena of labors, a theater of disgraces, a spectacle of wrongs, a horrible precipice, a house of anxieties, a turbid sea, a vale of calamities, the home of hardships, the mirror of vanities, the corruption of minds, the snare of souls, the parent of death, the inferno of the living, and a pile of transient things.”

Many items on the list remind me of unlikely but sorely needed collective nouns, as in “a threshing floor of tribulations.” Here is one more sample of Salutati’s list-making: “The world is indeed a factory of vices. . . . Here are committed acts of pleasurable fornication, deflowering debauchery, violent rapes, acts of incest corrupting reverence for blood ties, adulteries that plot against the nuptial bed, sacrilegious pollution of women dedicated to God, wicked sexual intercourse with contrived sterility, and whatever the monstrous poison of sex excites in us.”