A bold new history of the female body, combining memoir with archival research to reveal a hidden history of birthing, caring and desiring - with radical implications for how we understand our bodies today 'A work of remarkable archival scholarship... extraordinary' Harriet Baker 'Illuminating and brave' Alison Light 'A wonderful history... intimate, fascinating and touching' Ian Mortimer An immersive hidden history of the female body, with radical implications for how we understand our bodies today Sex and abortion, pregnancy and birth, feeding and rocking and washing: these are embodied practices with a deep past. Yet the history of the female body remains largely unknown - even unimagined. Combining memoir with archival research, from fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries, Erin Maglaque assembles a chorus of women's voices from the pre-modern past. We encounter a vanished past both strikingly recognisable and strange, when ideas of the female body, sexuality, work and pleasure were more varied, more unruly, and sometimes freer. This is the invisible history of the female body - birthing, caring, working, desiring. Reaching deep into the shared history of women's lives, Presence points towards a radical new way of understanding our bodies today. 'An important, original contribution to modern feminist writing about the body' Gabriel Weston 'Immersive, revelatory and astonishing' Sophie Gilbert

Details

ISBN13: 9781787336803
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 336
Edition:
Publication Date: 30 Jun 2026
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 23.3(H)x15.5(L)x2(W)394
Weight (gm): 394

Author Biography

Erin Maglaque is a writer and historian. She earned her PhD from the University of Oxford, and now teaches history at Durham University. Erin writes regularly about history, gender, and feminism for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. Presence is her first book.

Reviews