Browne’s is one of many examples of this form, the fake catalogue. Donne wrote one; Rabelais included one in Gargantua and Pantagruel. More typically such works were outright spoofs of learned curiosity, send-ups of random assemblages that John Evelyn judged to be no more than ‘indigested chaos’. But Browne, although he recognises the absurdity of some of his own items and is obviously trying for comic effect with certain ones, is probably more interested in a philosophy of antiquities, of the past and of existing knowledge as resurrected and preserved from the ravages of time and forgetfulness. Browne’s aim, like that of the early-modern Baconians, was reparation and restoration of truth, and Musaeum Clausum reads like a wistful evocation of what might have existed in a legendary collection like the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Perhaps the most powerful rendition of that wistfulness is not in specific works or memorials of the great, but rather in the pitiful remains of Father Crispin, ‘buried long ago in the vaults of the Cordeliers at Toulouse, where the skins of the dead so dry and parch up without corruption that their persons may be known very long after, with this inscription, Ecce iterum Crispinus [behold Crispin again]’. The otherwise anonymous Father Crispin, an unremarkable monk whose name is his only chronicle, is immortalised by the strange atmosphere of the vault rather than for any accomplishment or quality; his survival as a physiognomy that can be ‘known very long after’ is merely a scientific phenomenon, not an intended memorial to an individual. The imperious inscription pathetically asks us with its commanding injunction to behold anew that which was never remarkable or memorable in the first place. Browne’s favourite theme, here and elsewhere, is the randomness of recollection, and Father Crispin, a random survival of the past, is preserved only to be lost again with the collection that contains him.