Doggerel Doggerel Doggerel is poetry that is irregular in rhythm and in rhyme, often deliberately for burlesque or comic effect. Alternatively, it can mean verse which has a monotonous rhythm, easy rhyme, and cheap or trivial meaning. The word is derived from the Middle English "dogerel", probably a derivative of "dog". In English it has been used as an adjective since the 14th century and a noun since at least 1630. Appearing since ancient times in the literatures of many cultures, it is characteristic of nursery rhymes and children's song. The Scottish poet William McGonagall (1825-1902) has become famous for his
Crisis of the Late Middle Ages Referred to in Italian as the "Crisis of the 14th Century", Giovanni Cherubini alluded to the debate that already by 1974 had been going on "for several decades" in French, British, American, and German historiography. Arno Borst (1992) says that it "is a given that fourteenth century Latin Christianity was in a crisis", and goes on to say that the intellectual aspects and how universities were affected by the crisis is underrepresented in the scholarship hitherto: "When we discuss the crisis of the Late Middle Ages, we consider intellectual movements beside religious, social, and economic ones", and gives some examples.