Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body - Hardcover

$30.00

Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body - Hardcover

Name: Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body - Hardcover
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9781662603341
Price: 30.00 USD
Availability: InStock

by Erin Maglaque

$30.00

Book Overview

"[A] soulful, moving, sometimes cacophonous account of European women's experiences and interior lives from about 1500 to 1800."--Mattie Kahn, The New York Times Book Review

A vibrant history of women's bodies, expertise, and work from a major new writer--stylish, revelatory, and liberating.

Today, we understand the mind and the body to be distinct; that the mind exercises control over the flesh. But as Erin Maglaque experienced the transformations of pregnancy, abortion, birth, and care-giving, she began to doubt the truth of that dichotomy. In an effort to better understand her experiences, she found herself reaching to the premodern past, a period when the strange rubbed up against the strikingly recognizable: when people accepted both levitation and the smallpox vaccine, witchcraft and universal gravitation; a time when understandings of the body and its capacity for thought were more expansive, and more unruly.

Structured as a biography of the author's own body, from girlhood and adolescence, to sex and abortion, to feeding and caring for an infant, to her experience caring for someone as they were dying, Erin places her personal history into a deep dialogue with the premodern past. She explores the relation between imagination and gender, between maternal and historical subjectivity; she positions female desire as a practice with a past, and offers gentler and more forgiving understandings of housekeeping, pregnancy, early miscarriage, abortion, birth, sleeplessness, and breastfeeding.

For readers of Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, Cat Bohannon's Eve, and Olivia Laing's Everybody, Presence is a unique experiment in historical thinking and embodied knowledge; a thoroughly researched, vibrant history of women's bodies, expertise, and work from a major new writer.

ISBN	9781662603341
Author	Erin Maglaque
Publisher	Astra House
Genre	History and Education
Format	Hardcover
Published	June 2026
Language	ENG- English
Pages	320
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print