England, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983 ), 82 – 103 ; David R. Parker,The
Commonplace Book in Tudor London. An Examination of BL MSS Egerton 1995 ,
Harley 2252 , Lansdowne 762 , and Oxford Balliol College MS 354 (Lanham, 1998 ),
89 – 127. A. S. G. Edwards rigorously argues the implications of the poem’smulti-
ple witnesses in“Deconstructing Skelton: The Texts of the English Poems,”Leeds
Studies in English 36 ( 2005 ), 335 – 53.
7. For Skelton’s Latin, I cite Kinsman,Poems, which also includes the marginal
glosses appended to the parts of the poem in Harley 2252.
8. So Lerer,Chaucer and his Readers, 201 – 02.
9. Quintilian,Institutio oratoria, 8. 4. 3 ; Lisa Kallet-Marx,Money, Expense and
Naval Power in Thucydides’History 1 – 5. 24 (Berkeley, 1993 ), 23.
10. PL 113. 115 ; I cite John Fyler’s translation inLanguage and the Declining World
in Chaucer, Dante and Jean de Meun(Cambridge, 2007 ), 43. On Babel and
fallen language more generally, see Fyler,Language and the Declining World,
35 – 59.
11. On Parott’s “frantycke” speech: Nathaniel Owen Wallace, “The
Responsibilities of Madness: John Skelton,‘Speak, Parrot,’and Homeopathic
Satire,”Studies in Philology 82 ( 1985 ), 60 – 80.
12. I follow here the reading of F. W. Brownlow in“Speke Parrot: Skelton’s
Allegorical Denunciation of Cardinal Wolsey,”Studies in Philology 65 ( 1968 ),
124 – 39 ( 135 ).
13. Kathy Lavezzo,Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature and
English Community, 1000 – 1534 (Ithaca, 2006 ), 133.
14. Griffiths,John Skelton, 87.
15. For the fullest examination of these glosses, of uncertain provenance, seeibid.,
107 – 08 , 113 – 17.
16. Michael Uebel,Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle
Ages(New York, 2005 ), 117.
17. Ibid., 119.
18. Halpern,Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 127.
19. Jean Lemaire de Belges,Les Épîtres de l’amant vert, ed. Jean Frappier (Lille,
1948 ), lines 126 – 28 (“great joy...in inventing and making noise and sound in
order not to hinder the fruit of your pleasure”). On classical and medieval
parrot lore, see Bernard Ribémont,“Histoires de perroquets: petit itinéraire
zoologique et poétique,”Reinardus 3 ( 1990 ), 155 – 71 ; more generally, Bruce
Thomas Boehrer,Parrot Culture: Our 2 , 500 -Year-Long Fascination with the
World’s Most Talkative Bird(Philadelphia, 2004 ), 1 – 82.
20. On the resonances of“mynyon”at the Henrician court, see Greg Walker,
“The Expulsion of the Minions Reconsidered,”Historical Journal 32 ( 1989 ), 1 –
16 ; also Jonathan Goldberg,Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities
(Stanford, 1993 ), 48 , and Lerer,Courtly Letters, 34 – 86.
21. Halpern,Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 133.
22. I once again follow Brownlow,“‘Speke, Parrot,’”here at 125 – 27.
23. Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and
Edward Aveling, 4 vols. (London, 1954 ),i, 59.
Notes to Pages 147 – 52 213