The list of Guilds for 1499–1500 and Chester's Pre-Reformation or early Banns (1539–1540) corroborate that ‘our Lady thassumpcion’ in the city's Corpus Christi play was associated with its wives and widows:

By the time of the later Banns, recorded after the Reformation and by which time the cycle's performance had been moved to Whitsuntide, all mention of the play along with its text had disappeared, no doubt the consequence of its particularly Catholic and apocryphal content.

For those intrigued by the possibilities of women's engagement with pre-modern drama, the loss of the Chester ‘Assumption’ is a frustration. That it once existed, however, invites speculation regarding women's involvement in theatre celebrating the end of the Virgin's life. The play's text, like that of so many other pre-modern English Assumption plays, was lost during or after the Reformation. The surviving records and texts of Assumption plays from north, mid- and southern Europe indicate that the Chester ‘Assumption’, performed within a multilingual, walled city located on the porous border between England and Wales, should be better understood as part of a pan-European interest in dramatising the events surrounding the end of Mary's life. This essay, therefore, seeks to locate the lost Chester ‘Assumption’ in this wider European tradition in order to suggest possibilities for reassessing its staging, cultural significance, and the role played by the worshipful wives in its performance history.

CHESTER'S ASSUMPTION: WOMEN'S WORK

The Chester ‘Assumption’ offers the only evidence of women's production of Corpus Christi drama in the British Isles. The ‘wurshipfull wyffys’ were most likely the spouses and widows of the small group of Cestrian merchant families who held the main civic offices in Chester throughout the later fourteenth and earlier fifteenth century. These women may have been members of Chester's guild or fraternity dedicated to St Anne, the mother of the Virgin. The guild was revived in 1393 as a chantry foundation for the civic elite. Association with the St Anne confraternity afforded the wives of Chester's leading families what Catherine Sanok describes as ‘an important public identity and status within the community of guilds and crafts, even if they themselves were categorised as “wives” rather than a formal guild of work’.