Women’s hidden bodily history brought vividly to life
Erin Maglaque blends memoir and archival research to recover women’s embodied lives across the pre-modern past. Through fragments from medical texts, trial records, prayerbooks, letters and diaries, she explores birth, care, work, desire and the female body.
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Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body
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Women’s hidden bodily history brought vividly to life
Erin Maglaque blends memoir and archival research to recover women’s embodied lives across the pre-modern past. Through fragments from medical texts, trial records, prayerbooks, letters and diaries, she explores birth, care, work, desire and the female body.
- Book Synopsis
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'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
Ideal for readers who…
- want feminist history that explores the female body through birth, care, work and desire.
- are interested in archival research that recovers women’s voices from the pre-modern past.
- like history books that blend personal reflection with scholarship and social insight.
- read women’s history, gender studies or body politics with a human, intimate focus.
- are choosing a thoughtful hardback for readers of feminist non-fiction and cultural history.
- About The Author
- 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.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781787335356
- Format
- Hardback
- Publisher
- Jonathan Cape, (18 June 2026)
- Number of Pages
- 320
- Weight
- 532 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 242 x 164 x 32 mm
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