Erin Maglaque

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!

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.

For too long, history has trivialised and even deleted women’s physical experiences. 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.

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.

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.

In Presence, Erin Magalaque 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.

An impressive book debut . . . As Maglaque examines pregnancy and miscarriage, abortion, labor and birth, caregiving, housework, and care of the dying, the voices of myriad women (herself included) amply fulfill her aim of making the past ‘present and immediate.’ A richly textured, revelatory history.” 
“An impressive book debut . . . As Maglaque examines pregnancy and miscarriage, abortion, labor and birth, caregiving, housework, and care of the dying, the voices of myriad women (herself included) amply fulfill her aim of making the past ‘present and immediate.’ A richly textured, revelatory history.

A Hidden History of the Female Body

A hidden history of the female body - birthing, caring, working 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. 
 
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 – wanting, bleeding, 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

Praise for Presence

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 ...

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.

For too long, history has trivialised and even deleted women’s physical experiences. In Presence, Erin Maglaque does something radical, not only dissolving the obsolete Cartesian divide – which insists on sep ...

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 ...

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.

For too long, history has trivialised and even deleted women’s physical experiences. In Presence, Erin Maglaque does something radical, not only dissolving the obsolete Cartesian divide – which insists on sep ...

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 ...

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.

For too long, history has trivialised and even deleted women’s physical experiences. In Presence, Erin Maglaque does something radical, not only dissolving the obsolete Cartesian divide – which insists on sep ...

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