Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body Author: Erin MaglaqueISBN-13: 9781787335356Publisher: Jonathan CapeGuideline Price: £25“There I was,” writes Erin Maglaque of her son’s delivery with forceps that felt every bit an invention of the 18th century, “being penetrated by the Enlightenment”. After years of separating her body from her mind, viewing the past with intellectual distance and detachment, the pain of labour brought her “before or beyond” her thinking mind, and the experience “fractured her sense of time”. Instead of flow of chronology, time came in waves, overlapping and repeating in flashbacks, sleepless nights, and the “obsessive attention” of early motherhood. Maglaque is, as she told a neonatal nurse while bleeding and dazed, a “historian of…all this”, but for months she couldn’t write, felt she had nothing to say, and could find no meaning in a rupture that couldn’t be described. Yet as her body slowly came back to life – with desire for company, solitude, freedom, desire itself – she began to feel the presence of women she had encountered in early modern archives. Accused of infanticide in 1610 Bologna, Lucia Pivinelli had been similarly uncertain: “I don’t know what to make of it,” she told her interrogators. Telling a friend of her stillbirth labour in 1682, Elizabeth Armitage told a friend that she had “had a night that would have killed a horse”. Elizabeth Clift lamented to her brother in 1795 that “I have all wise Got the Child night an day so I canot writ no time”. To the Inquisition in 1568, Jehanne du Noyer insisted “my body is mine”.There was, Maglaque writes in this intimate and ambitious book, “no history of what had happened to me” or these women, of “experiences long considered to be too private, too intimate, and too fragmentary to be admitted as true history”. She began to think that instead of separating her body from her mind, as she felt her intellectual career had required, she needed to find a way to write history “that did not ignore the body but that flowed from it”, a way of thinking that demanded not detachment, but presence.As she examined women caring, carrying, feeding, working, wanting, Maglaque felt “the shock of recognition” in their experiences, as “again and again, the past became presence”. There was Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater’s pregnant plea for her and her child that birth “part us, and make me become a new creature”; Modena sex worker Margarita Chiappona’s defiant prayer, “Satisfy all my desire”; and everywhere women’s bodies doing “everything all at once”. ‘The intersection of then and now is most visceral in Maglaque’s history of desire, something she had ceased to feel after giving birth, yet inescapably present in the words and actions of the women she encounters’Yet this is much more than a history of recovery, and Maglaque offers no universal or essential womanhood, instead arguing that every embodied experience is both “specifically historical and wildly timeless”. In no other period is that paradox more dramatic than in the early modern centuries of Reformations and Enlightenment, when European ideas and control of women’s bodies were transformed in a strikingly familiar but shockingly alien world where “people accepted both levitation and the smallpox vaccine”. Most of what we think about women’s bodies is actually “quite recent”, birthed in the 18th century. Maglaque highlights “a vanished world of the pre-Enlightenment past, where imagery of the female body, of sexuality and work and pleasure, was more varied, and sometimes freer”. Sex was predominantly non-penetrative, female orgasm was considered essential for conception, and so too was the correct position (“a woman must be looking at God when she came”). Pregnancy, breastfeeding, and motherhood were “the height of the erotic”; (“to purify motherhood of its sexuality”, Maglaque writes, “is to accept self-abnegation and self-sacrifice is fate”).[ Will homosexuals have to wait as long as Galileo for papal approval?Opens in new window ]None of that is to say that the pre-modern was less patriarchal or oppressive for women (far from it), but instead that our ideas about women’s bodies are “not natural, but profoundly historical. That it wasn’t always like this.” Even as she makes the past more present and immediate, Maglaque highlights its “resistance to our purposes”. She argues not for cyclical repetition, anachronistic equivalence, or “historically shallow” certainty, but for the importance of understanding that “we once imagined different ways of living, and that we might do so again”.This is perhaps most pressing when it is viscerally clear how history has made us. One of Maglaque’s most striking chapters is on the history of abortion, or as it was to early modern Italians, “disgravidanza” (“unpregnancy”). For early modern women, abortion was “not a right but a fact of life”, something “ordinary” (for married couples as well as those with unexpected pregnancies). Mattia, raped by her father in 1593, recounted how her foetus “slipped out like a slice of ham” as she worked in the fields. Abortion was rarely prosecuted and early-stage foetuses were not generally considered people: a Roman midwife explained in 1634 that she did not baptise them “because they are not alive”. Pope Sixtus V’s 1588 bull deeming all abortions to be murder had to be rescinded within three years, and (contrary to the false history of today’s right) it would be nearly 300 years before the Catholic Church returned to his definition. Restrictions and attitudes would harden, but Maglaque is more focused on how we generally ignore the embodied experience in our focus on arguments: “the carnality of it – the blood and tissue, cramping and sweat – is a rebuke to interpretation”. She remembers how her first abortion “did not feel like a choice… mostly it just hurt”; how a second felt “like relief”; how it “haunts” her because the beginning of a life ended, but existed “in its own undefinable and immanent way”. “I do not want to forget my abortion”, she writes, or those of so many other women, not least because in new restrictions on women’s reproductive freedom, “the past does not appear to have ended”.[ Hot Milk: A heated affair, an overbearing Fiona Shaw and some shameful Irish sexualityOpens in new window ]The intersection of then and now is most visceral in Maglaque’s history of desire, something she had ceased to feel after giving birth, yet inescapably present in the words and actions of the women she encounters. In her notebook, she records fragments of early modern women wanting; wanting independence, recognition, time, space, love, pleasure, “and most of all wanting freedom”. At the Inquisition in Venice in 1587, a woman called Elisabetta recounted how she would undress and use a candle to send her naked silhouette (“my shadow, my sister”) to lovers, freeing herself and her desires in ways her world made impossible. Maglaque’s desire to understand these women’s unknowable yet familiar desires became a desire to know and understand her own, and she began to record her own experiences alongside those of past women, “a doubled search, a double accounting”. Yet like the 17th-century clerical investigator unable to transcribe the details of two nuns’ intense sex, Maglaque’s notes “become illegible”, her “handwriting larger and messier, writing incapable of capturing the shape” of what she did and felt. In her desire to understand both her subjects and herself, she becomes obsessed with love magic that shows early modern women’s all-consuming “need for the real, the carnal”, for a lover to want and “take pleasure” in them. She sets their spells alongside her own wanting: “the way I begged him… the way my thighs ached for days…the way I asked what was that”. Maglaque’s writing is beautifully elegant, but she is doing much more than just recording, asking us to consider what history can be when we are more aware of our presence in it, and its presence in us, even in our most intimate, intense, and vulnerable moments. Perhaps, she argues, by thinking with our bodies, “we can learn to place ourselves in the flow of time”. ‘No history should or can cover everything, but the shadows of enslaved and indigenous women certainly loom over the Enlightenment’s carnal transformations, as do the bodily experiences of Muslim, African and Asian women’“If we take female desire seriously,” Maglaque asks, “what else would then have to change?” What other “possible lives” would we imagine? Her erotic and intellectual experiments began to make her think that “both were a kind of restlessness, a circulating, roving search for a knowledge that would never stop – never settle or satisfy”. There was no end to desire, no solution to the questions, just the search itself, for “an unfinished freedom” that early modern history shows “women had to be taught not to want”.[ ‘Cliteracy’: The ‘iceberg’ of female anatomy has as-yet hidden depthsOpens in new window ]There are some forms of unfreedom that are mostly absent. No history should or can cover everything, but the shadows of enslaved and indigenous women certainly loom over the Enlightenment’s carnal transformations, as do the bodily experiences of Muslim, African and Asian women. Yet it is testament to Maglaque’s work and writing that it merely leaves one thinking and wanting more. In her prologue, Maglaque quotes Lyndal Roper on “the pain, the frustration, and the rage of belonging to the sex that does not yet even have its own history”. Recent decades have seen vital contributions to righting that wrong, and this powerful book certainly joins them. But, Maglaque writes, “that rage, as well as the work of writing that history, continues”. The search goes on, as it must.Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and the host of Ireland’s Edge.Further ReadingA Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering (W&N, 2026), by Elinor Cleghorn – Cleghorn follows her bestselling Unwell Women, which exposed the misdiagnoses of male-made medicine, with an exploration of motherhood’s radical past.Flick: The Story of Female Pleasure (Bantam, 2026), by Kate Lister – the popular podcaster engagingly charts shifting attitudes to women’s sexuality over centuries.Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Penguin, 2023), by Cat Bohannon – a scientific history of the female body and its overlooked importance in evolution.