For research into British mumming plays, our main bibliographical and locational tool is still Cawte, Helm and Peacock's English Ritual Drama, which is now twenty-seven years old.
This conference session will introduce and, I hope, demonstrate, two linked projects aimed at providing efficient access to existing and future material on the subject.
The Bibliography is a straightforward bibliographic database covering published material and giving details of author, periodical and article titles, publisher, date, and so on. Annotations are not yet included, but will be added at a later stage. The database is fully searchable and sortable by any field. At present there are 1434 entries.
The Index takes a different approach. Its primary organisation is by geographical location, and it indexes the plays themselves - giving details of source (whether published or not), content (text, description, etc.), character names, informants, and so on. Again, all these elements are searchable and sortable. The Index stands at 1484 entries so far.
Both the Index and Bibliography are designed to be simple enough to be used by researchers on their home computers and will be available commercially from Hisarlik Press. One key advantage of a computer-held system is that it can, and will, be updated as further material comes to light.