Presence

A Hidden History of the Female Body

Read by: Alix Dunmore

Author: Erin Maglaque

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At a Glance

Format
Digital Audiobook

Duration
07:55.49

Published: 18th June 2026

Digital Audiobook

$26.81

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**Brought to you by Penguin.

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 uncovers the hidden history of the desiring, labouring, caring women of the pre-modern past. From fragments in medical manuals, trial transcripts, letters, diaries, legal treatises, prayerbooks and case books, she assembles a chorus of women's voices. Through them, 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. Restless, exuberant and beautifully written, Maglaque uncovers a hidden female history and points towards a radical new way of understanding our bodies today.