Ten essays from the September 1998 conference The Waning of the Middle Ages? A Reappraisal of Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, held in Dublin seek cultural, political, and aesthetic significance in a body of work generally considered exceptionally dull. Mostly English, the scholars portray the society of the period as on the brink of radical and irrevocable change, and find in the work of Lydgate, Hoccleve, Skelton and their anonymous contemporaries a perplexing and variable blend of self- consciousness, paranoia, and political and poetic triumphalism. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)