Thanks for the note Sandy.  One of our founding fathers, as it were.  We so need some young recruits to keep REED going, it seems.

Best,
SRW

> On Jun 12, 2014, at 10:06 AM, Carolyn Black <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From Alexandra Johnston:
>
> We learned today that Larry Clopper, one of REED's first editors, has died in Bloomington, Indiana.
>
> I first met Larry at the Medieval Drama Seminar at the Modern Language Association in Chicago in 1973 when Margaret Dorrell Rogerson and myself who were editing the York records, Larry who was editing the Chester records and David Galloway who was editing the Norwich records had been invited to give papers on our work. It was at that meeting that the idea of REED was born and from the beginning Larry was an active partner. His edition of the Chester records was well advanced by the time REED was operational in 1976 and the fledgling editorial team in Toronto was able to form REED's editorial policies as two very different collections -- Chester and York -- were being processed. Both collections were published in 1979. Larry was a longstanding member of the REED Advisory Board from the beginning of the project. Although his scholarly interests widened after the publication of the Chester volume to include other areas of Middle English literature such as Piers Plowman, he responded gamely to the suggestion of a second edition of his Chester records in the context of the records of Cheshire edited by Elizabeth Baldwin and David Mills. This collection was published in 2007 almost 30 years after his original research. All three editors were at the launch in Chester and those of us there were treated to a spirited but amicable debate between Larry and David about the pageant route standing on the streets of Chester in the pouring rain. We note with sadness that Larry and David -- two great REED men of Chester -- have died within a year of each other.
>
> Larry made other important contributions to the study of early theatre and its cultural context particularly through his controversial book Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (2001). He loved an argument and would defend his ideas with great vigour -- but such debates were invariably followed by a glass of good wine or a great meal in a restaurant he had just discovered. He will be missed by all of us in the REED community.