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

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.

In this exhilarating book, Erin Maglaque explores the hidden history of the desiring, labouring, caring women of the pre-modern past. From fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries, she assembles a chorus of women’s voices. 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 – working, desiring, bleeding, rocking, spinning, dying. Reaching deeper into the shared history of women’s lives, Presence points towards a radical new way of understanding our bodies today.

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.