James Madison Carpenter was an American who carried out fieldwork in England between 1928 and 1935. During this time he collected what must surely be one of the largest, if not the largest, compilation of British folk performance materials ever assembled. It is now held in the American Folklife Centre at the Library of Congress, Washington where access is inhibited because of a lack of an adequate catalogue. The collection includes some 300 folk play texts from England and Scotland.
This paper discusses Carpenter and his collecting and discusses the work which is being done in a project based at the National Centre for English Cultural tradition at the University of Sheffield. This is a project which, starting with an on-line catalogue, will, we hope, ultimately result in a full critical edition of the whole collection.
