MACARONICS, burlesque poetry, in which modern words with Latin endings are introduced into Latin verse, so as to pro duce a ridiculous effect. Sometimes Greek is used instead of Latin. The founder of the practice was Teofilo Folengo (149i- 1544), whose mock-heroic Liber Macaronicus appeared in 1517. Folengo (q.v.) was a Benedictine monk, who escaped from his monastery and lived a dissolute life, supporting himself by his absurd verses, which he described as an attempt to produce in literature something like macaroni, a gross, rude and rustic mix ture of flour, cheese and butter. His poem is a burlesque epic, containing an extraordinary medley of chivalrous feats, ridiculous and squalid adventures and satirical allegory. Its effect upon Rabelais was so extraordinary that no examination of Pantagruel can be complete without a reference to it. It was imitated in Italy by a number of minor poets ; and in France Antonius de Arena published at Avignon in 1573 a burlesque account of Charles V.'s disastrous campaign in Provence. Folengo in Italy and Arena in France are regarded as the macaronic classics. Great
popularity was achieved later by an anonymous macaronic, entitled Funestissimus trepassus Micheli Morini, who died by falling off the branch of an elm-tree : De branche in brancham degringolat, et faciens pouf Ex ormo cadit, et clunes obvertit Olympo.
Moliere employed macaronic verse in the ceremonial scene with the doctors in Le Malade imaginaire. Works in macaronic prose are rarer. An Anti-Clopinus by Antony Hotman may be men tioned and the Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515).
The use of true macaronics has never been frequent in Great Britain, where the only prominent example of it is the Polemo Middinia ascribed to Drummond of Hawthornden (q.v.). This describes a quarrel between two villages on the Firth of Forth, and Drummond shows great ingenuity in the tacking on of Latin ter minations to his Lowland Scots vernacular.
See Ch. Nodier, Du Langage factice appele macaronique (1834) ; F. W. Genthe, Geschichte der Macaronischen Poesie (Leipzig, Halle, 1836).