“[A] post that produces a modern edition of medieval collective nouns … which organizes the nouns neatly into groups of beasts, birds, dressing of game, objects, and humans, misses the point. It misses both the inhuman charge of alphabetization as well as the associational logic less concerned with human and other difference than with similarities of mass, motion, and needs.

It’s not that the human disappears in these alphabetical lists, but rather that the logic of the alphabet prevails, if we want to get linguistic (though edit of course the list isn’t really alphabetized!); or, if we want to get materialist, it’s that the logic of recognizing a group differs wildly from that which tries to carve out a recognizable individual, whether human, nun, or otherwise, from the heterogeneous field of stuff.

Thus, in addition to the always delightful “superfluity of nuns,” we get groupings like the following:

a beuye of larkes
a beuye of ladyes
a beuye of quayles
a beuye of roos

Skulke of foxes
a skulke of freres [friars]
a skulke of theuez [thieves]

from In the Middle.