Many of us grew up with England and Pollard's edition of The Towneley Plays and with Arthur Cawley's selection, The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle. We now work with the Early English Text Society edition by Stevens and Cawley, which took so long to appear that aspects of its commentary were already out of date by the time it was published, and with Garrett Epp's TEAMS edition, which moved faster. The Towneley manuscript, San Marino, CA: Huntington Library MS HM1, to give it its full designation, has attracted, and is still attracting, so much new scholarship, especially in the last fifty years, that all editors do their best to hit a moving target while fundamentals such as the provenance and date of the contents of the manuscript remain contentious.

In recent years we have lost Barbara Palmer and Olga Horner, both of whom made important contributions to those fundamental conundrums. The latter was working with Meg Twycross on research into the catalogues of the library of the Towneley family that exposed the anomaly that, although the manuscript has a Towneley shelf-mark, it is absent from any of their catalogues. Barbara Palmer is largely responsible for definitively undermining the commonplace understanding that the manuscript represented a ‘cycle’ from Wakefield, as her work on the West Riding revealed plays in many other locations that may have been drawn together in what is emerging as a compilation. Meg Twycross is still working on the Towneley family and the history of the manuscript and investigating the possible relationship between the manuscript and the great Catholic survivalist houses of the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire border. Most recently, Alexandra Johnston has pursued another line of enquiry, prompted by correspondence with the late Malcolm Parkes, who identified the hand of the manuscript as that of a Chancery clerk writing during the reign of Mary Tudor – that is, 1553–8:

Johnston goes on to contextualise this suggestion within the history of the Reformation in the archdiocese of York.

Meanwhile, informed by historical and codicological investigation, fresh critical studies of its contents proceed.