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
Midwifery in the Middle Ages "the one sacrament in the Middle Ages that could be performed by anyone - cleric or lay person, man or woman." Such ecclesiastical and secular regulatory introductions, Greilsammer writes, led to a "reduction in the status and role of the midwives" that "was part of a more general degradation of attitudes toward women, and women in command of some knowledge and power in particular." Greilsammer notes that this change in perception can "be placed in its urban context and related to the general decline in women’s employment throughout Europe at the end of the Middle Ages." Such developments forced many