About the Book
'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
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.
Review :
An elegantly told, intricately researched reclamation of women's own experiences of their bodily lives. Tender, revelatory, and endlessly compelling, this book is a profoundly important work of historical recovery
A work of remarkable archival scholarship, and a radical recovery of the history of female embodiment. As I read, the closeness of these pre-modern women was uncanny and revelatory: their voices rang in my ears, and in their words I encountered things I had felt and experienced. Extraordinary!
A magnificent work of history. Erin Maglaque uncovers the inner thoughts of ordinary women who lived centuries years ago and lets us hear their voices as if they were alive with us now. And the things they have to tell us — about desire, about childcare, about sleep, sleeplessness, and death — have rarely seemed so urgent. Breathtaking, intimate, and moving, this is how history should be written in the future.
Impassioned and deeply thoughtful, Presence taps into the feelings, desires and fears of women in the past. It left me pondering my own physical experiences. Illuminating and brave.
A wonderful history... Intimate, fascinating and touching
An immersive, revelatory, and astonishing book about women, told through the distinct bodily experiences that punctuate our lives, and the history we’ve rarely been taught. Beautifully written and acutely insightful, Presence connects us to ourselves, our foremothers, and each other.
A landmark book... She brings these mysterious shadowy figures to life and it's as if we hear their voices for the first time
In Presence, Erin Maglaque does something radical, not only dissolving the obsolete Cartesian divide – which insists on separating thoughts and feelings – but daring to honour her own bodily truths as worthy of record. An important, original contribution to modern feminist writing about the body.
Engrossing and vital, Presence rediscovers the female body as a vessel of history. Interweaving past and present, the personal with incisive scholarship, these stories reveal the rich, unexpected, and sometimes brutal ways in which the complexities of female embodiment connect all women across all time.
Erin Maglaque expands and explodes the genre of personal history. In a voice at once deeply learned and often disarmingly intimate, these explorations unravel much of what women have been told about our bodies, desires, and capacities. They embody a mode of thought that does not only describe freedom but enacts it.
