Presence by Erin Maglaque

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.