A major feature of this year has been the consolidation of existing expertise, planning for its future exploitation, and a vigorous campaign on electronic work in progress. Three instances of this were demo'd at the September 1999 Conference on Digital Resources in the Humanities.

The various members also pursued their particular interests within the Project:

• Professor King is working on a series of articles on the York Plays and the liturgy, and completing her work on the Coventry Mystery Plays;
• Professor Twycross spent every available moment in the Leuven City Archives, and in working on her electronic palaeography course;
• Mrs Horner pursued her interest in the York Plays and late medieval law, and in the Hull Customs accounts;
• Miss Bennett completed her catalogue of Norah Lambourne's stage and costume designs for the 1950s York Festival productions.

The Norah Lambourne Archive

In 15-17 February 1999 Professors Twycross and King and Miss Bennett made an expedition to Norah Lambourne's Normandy home to return to her the costume designs and other documents loaned to the Project, to express their warmest thanks for for this, and to present her with a CD of part of the soundtrack of the 1951 York production. Miss Lambourne very kindly deposited her designs and further material and memorabilia from the 1950s York productions with the Project. She also later in the year designed an evocative CD-ROM cover for Helen Bennett's MA dissertation CD.

Increased Access
The Project is increasingly being consulted by visitors to its Website and other contacts for information and material about the production of medieval plays. The Project is very much aware of its remit, confirmed by the original British Academy funding, to make its findings generally available by other means than the conventional academic paper.
More immediately, we will at intervals be adding smaller pages describing some of our Project material. You may have noticed the new links to the Liber Boonen: we have now added one about the electronic Coventry facsimile, and another will follow about the so-called 'Bolton Hours'. It must be stressed that we are bound by copyright considerations, and so should our readers be. Watch this space for further information.

Project activities:

• Postgraduate students' activities
• Project Associates' activities
• Project Directors' activities
• Publications and Papers

Postgraduate students

	Helen Bennett (Lancaster University) has completed, with distinction, an MA on Norah Lambourne's costume designs for the 1950s York Festival productions. She has prepared a catalogue of Miss Lambourne's surviving designs. This, with scans of the designs and an introduction covering the York Festival and Miss Lambourne's biography, was presented on CD-ROM, in HTML format. It was accompanied by a paper-based introduction to the media and methods used.
	Mrs Lena Etherington (St Martin's College, Lancaster) has spent the year working on an MPhil editing the 'Doomsday' portion of The Prick of Conscience. This will involve an electronic facsimile edition.
	Mrs Glynis Queenan (Lancaster University) is completing her MA on the depiction of the Seven (more usually Six) Corporal Works of Mercy in medieval English stained-glass windows. Her thesis covers All Saints', North Street, York; Holy Trinity, Tattershall; St Mary's, Coombs; St Andrew's, Chinnor; and the surviving panels from Wigston's Hospital, Leicester. She has found significant inter-relations between these both in iconography and patronage. Her findings will be presented on CD-ROM.

Project Associates’ activities

Mrs Olga Horner has published an article on the critique of livery and maintenance in the York Carpenters' Play of the Resurrection (see below under Publications). She is also working on an edition of the Hull Customs Accounts from 1370 to 1450. Mrs Alison Samuels is working on an article on the letters exchanged between Thomas Sharp and Francis Douce on the subject of the former's edition of the Coventry Mystery Plays (later to become A Dissertation on the pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry). This correspondence is divided between the British Library and the Bodleian Library. This is a pilot for a more extended study of the Sharp/Douce correspondence, and their circle.

Project Directors’ activities

Besides the conference papers and publications listed below, Professor King has been working on:

• a joint edition with Professor Clifford Davidson of the two surviving Coventry Plays, to be published by Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, at the end of 1999;
• a facsimile edition of the Coventry plays on CD-ROM, with the technical assistance of Helen Bennett;
• an article on ‘The York Cycle and Corpus Christi Reconsidered’ for publication in Medieval English Theatre;
• in the longer term, a book on liturgical influences on the York Cycle;

Professor Twycross visited Leuven several times during 1998-9, and began work on the records of processional and theatrical activity in the civic records. She is applying for funding to transcribe, translate, and evaluate this material. She is also involved with others in setting up a project on the dramatic records of the Low Countries after the manner of Records of Early English Drama, but with a distinctive style suitable to the material and structures of academic activity in Belgium and the Netherlands.

She is working on the following publications:

with Dr Guido Latré, the facsimile edition and translation of the ommegang section of the 1594 Liber Boonen; the article on stage heavens, with particular reference to the York Doomsday Play; a CD-ROM teaching package on palaeography, using expertise developed in work on the Project, and an article on this for the Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing; with Sarah Carpenter, a book on masks in medieval and early Tudor theatre, festivities and society, currently nearing completion, for Ashgate Press.

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Publications and Papers

• Meg Twycross, Pamela M. King and Andrew Prescott ‘The York Doomsday Project’ in Towards the Digital Library: The British Library's ‘Initiatives for Access’ Programme (London: The British Library, 1998);
• Meg Twycross ‘Medieval Stage Design’ The Dictionary of Art (1999);
• Olga Horner ‘“Us Must Make Lies”’: Witness, Evidence and Proof in the York Resurrection’, Medieval English Theatre 20 (1998) 24-76.

Conference Papers

• Pamela M. King ‘The York Cycle and the Feast of Corpus Christi Reconsidered’ (International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre (SITM), Odense, August 1998, and Conference of the International Association of University Professors of English, Durham, August 1998);
• Pamela M. King ‘Lessons on the Sacraments in the York Cycle’ (30th Anniversary Papers, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, 3 November 1998);
• Pamela M. King and Meg Twycross ‘The Contexts of the Last Judgement in Fifteenth-Century Northern Manuscripts: Doomsday as Hypertext’ (34th International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, May 1999);
• Pamela M. King ‘Medieval Drama and Liturgy’ (Conference on ‘Lancastrian Shakespeare’: Hoghton Tower, 21-23 July, 1999);
• Pamela M. King ‘The Treasurer's Cadaver in York Minster Reconsidered’ (16th Harlaxton Symposium, 26-29 July 1999);
• Pamela M. King ‘Corpus Christi in Valencia’ (4th International Conference on European Medieval Drama, Camerino, 6-8 August 1999);
• Meg Twycross ‘The Leuven City Archives’ (keynote paper, 4th International Conference on European Medieval Drama, Camerino, 6-8 August 1999).