This is the invisible history of the female body - working, desiring, bleeding, rocking, spinning, dying.

Presence

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

Erin Maglaque is a writer and historian, originally from western Massachusetts. She teaches history at the University of Sheffield in the UK and she received a PhD in History from the University of Oxford. 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 the New Statesman and her essays have been translated into multiple languages.

Alison Light

Alison Light is the author of five books of non-fiction to date and numerous other publications; she is a contributor to the London Review of Books and has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement among others. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society.

She is currently an Honorary Fellow in English and History at Pembroke College, Oxford and has held honorary professorships at University College, London and Edinburgh University.

All her books have been enthusiastically reviewed in the national and international press. Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007) was runner-up for the Longmans History Prize and long-listed for the Samuel Johnson (now the Baillie Gifford) prize in non-fiction. Common People (2014) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. A Radical Romance (2019) won the Pen Ackerley prize for memoir.

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