Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body

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.

'A work of remarkable archival scholarship... extraordinary' Harriet Baker
'Illuminating and brave' Alison Light
'A wonderful history... intimate, fascinating and touching' Ian Mortimer

© Erin Maglaque 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026