Silence and Chastity

This chapter complements Chapter 6. It focuses on one of Arnaudin’s most prolific singers, a woman named Catherine Gentes. Rather than what Catherine sang, the chapter asks what she did not. By leaving verses out of well-known songs, or by refusing to sing whole songs, Catherine created a very different personal repertoire of singing to the picture presented in Chapter 6 of the bawdy singing of the moorlands. The chapter replaces these singing choices in her life, suggesting that her identity as a seamstress and her physical impairment would have encouraged her community to sexualize her. The fact that she systematically avoided bawdy singing material suggests some of the ways that she attempted to forge an alternative identity, which did not necessarily draw on Catholic models of female chastity.