Click on the link to go to an Internet edition of this C13 Latin work translated to ModE. The Catena Aurea is Thomas Aquinas' arrangement of all the major patriarchs' line-by-line commentaries on the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Based on the Jewish scholarly tradition known as midrash, the Catena is immensely dense--just try the linked commentaries on the very first verse, Matthew I.1 (and keep scrolling down!). Still, the point of the name was that the commentaries create a "golden chain" which should draw forath the full significance of the gospel. Don't tell a Protestant that! But Protestants had their sermons, lots and lots of sermons, each hoping to be divinely inspired.
Compare the connectedness Spenser seeks to establish in his concatenated sonnets' rhyme schemes with the theologians' vision of a thoroughly explicated and completely inter-related reading of the gospels. Each sees the act of reading as an enrichment of the text by highly informed performance. The Catena Aurea vastly expands, and almost atomizes, the sacred text by surrounding it with commentary, whereas Spenser condenses, to rhyming couplets, the sonic relationships among the sonnet's ideas. If you read carefully, you may discover planned pairings of rhymed words that become thematically significant to our interpretation of the poem when picked out by the rhymes. They might harmonize similar concepts or things, or they might express antithetical oppositions.