This chapter deals not with a single form or genre, but with the satiric, invective or humourous use of several. As it happens, the patterns of previous scholarship have proved particularly distorting in relation to Anglo-Latin satiric verse, with neo-Latin scholars tending to focus on Renaissance versions of the classical Roman genre of hexameter satire, typicallyinterpreted in terms of ‘Horatian’ vs ‘Juvenalian’ (less often Persian) style. In England, however, there were almost no examples of this genre of satiric verse until the early eighteenth century. This chapter takes a different approach, attempting to survey the various ways in which Anglo-Latin verse of various genres and formsfunctioned as satire or invective, focusing in particular on satiric epigram, iambic verse, rhyming verse and various kinds of 'free' or experimental poetry. In this way, the chapter offers a guide to the main ways in which Latin verse was used for humourous, satiric and invective purposes in early modern England, with attention to changing patterns over time.

Following a typological classification of metrical systems, word stress in most Germanic languages can be described as characterized by trochaic rhythm, rightmost main stress, left-oriented secondary stress, and quantity-sensitivity. Most Germanic languages, after contact with languages of the Romance type and incorporation of vast amounts of loanwords into their lexicon, place main stress on one of the last three syllables of the word. For most of them it has furthermore been observed that heavy syllables influence the assignment of stress, even though not necessarily in all phonological contexts. Exceptions are Icelandic and Faroese, where main stress falls consistently on the leftmost syllable of the word and syllable weight does not play any role in stress assignment. For those Germanic languages for which secondary stress has been described, parsing of left-aligning secondary stress feet can be assumed.