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The Epic Catalogue: List Form and Reception from Beowulf to Paradise Lost (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture) - Hardcover
Inhaltsangabe
In The Epic Catalogue, Eva von Contzen offers the first sustained study of the catalogue as form in epic poetry, tracing its functions and meanings across medieval and early modern literature. Ever since the Catalogue of Ships in Homer’s Iliad, catalogues have stood at the heart of epic poetry, yet their status is paradoxical: canonical and indispensable for the genre of epic, but also resistant to narrative flow and therefore both a challenge and a nuisance to audiences. Moving from biblical epic and Milton’s Paradise Lost to Beowulf and early English poetry, von Contzen presents four case studies that examine the catalogue’s role in shaping poetic authority, readerly engagement, and the reception of classical models. Von Contzen’s literary-historical approach bridges classical and vernacular traditions from early English to early modern poetry and sharpens our view of both continuities and ruptures in the epic tradition, challenging conventional narratives of classical reception. Bringing together formalist and cognitive literary methodologies, she argues that catalogues are not inert enumerations but dynamic cognitive forms that invite audiences to think differently about order, memory, and the status of epic itself.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Eva von Contzen is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. She is the author of The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration and coeditor (with James Simpson) of Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature.
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The catalogue is a form that challenges us, as modern readers, to continue reading. As lists, they are not particularly inviting: They can be unwieldy, boring, frustrating, and (seemingly) superfluous. In some ways, lists are like Marmite: you either love it or you hate it. And yet, we cannot escape the list as a form; it is everywhere in our daily lives: from the list-form of Google entries and social media feeds to agendas, schedules, indices, registrars, dictionaries, to-do lists, and listicles in newspapers and magazines. In everyday contexts, catalogues have an immediate practical purpose: we can look up something in them, collect information on an item, or get an overview of several items. Once they have fulfilled their purpose, we discard them.
Since antiquity, poets and writers have employed catalogues as well as other forms of lists, with remarkable consistency in their works. The locus classicus for the Western tradition is the Catalogue of Ships in the second book of the Iliad. For over 300 lines, we are presented with names of the Greek leaders and their places of origin as they assemble upon Agamemnon’s call to sail against Troy. In all likelihood, this catalogue is one of the most frequently skipped passages in the history of reading. Its omission works so well because its content can be summarized, as I just did, in one sentence: it is a list of names and places. There is no plot, no complex narrative layout that requires explanation. Indeed, one does not need to read the Catalogue of Ships in order to understand and enjoy the Iliad. And yet, the Catalogue of Ships and the other, shorter lists and catalogues included in the Iliad have become one of the defining formal features of epic poetry. This is all the more striking, from a modern perspective, given that Homer’s epic, and epic poetry well into the early modern period, would have been recited or read aloud to an audience. In contexts of oral-aural transmission, skipping the catalogue was not an option. The catalogue may be the most skipped passage in the history of reading, but certainly not in the history of recital and listening. Evidently, lists and catalogues carried a different, much more positive, cultural value in ancient, medieval, and early modern contexts.
The term “catalogue” first appeared in the English language in the second half of the fifteenth century, where it was synonymous with “a list, register, or complete enumeration.” Systematic patterns of arrangement and order, as well as information added to an item, did not play a role yet; in this second, extended sense, “catalogue” came to be used from the seventeenth century onward. The Ancient Greek verb from which the modern English term is derived, katalegein, comprised four related sets of meaning: 1. “recount, tell at length and in order,” “repeat, recite”; 2. “reckon up, tell in full tale,” “reckon, count as,” “conclude by enumeration”; 3. “enumerate, draw up a list”; 4. (later) “select.” To catalogue something, then, meant both “to enumerate” and “to narrate.” The range of meanings suggests the close interdependence of the two activities, an interdependence that is retained in the German lexical pair aufzählen and erzählen, both of which are derivatives of the verb zählen, “to count.”
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