Yet more nonsense in this post. But in my defence, looking at parody is a good way of finding out about literary form (and we all need cheering up after the fifteenth-century misery…). As Eric Stanley writes in a very good article on parody in Middle English, ‘for literary parody established literary forms are needed’ (Poetica, 27 (1988)). Today’s lyric (scroll down for a text, somewhat modernised, and a translation) is a Tudor nonsense carol, surviving in a collection in the Huntington Library in a compilation of mid-sixteenth-century printed texts. We don’t know its exact date or who printed it. But it is an ingenious parody of the late medieval carol. It also features a monkey…