Erin Maglaque’s adoration for the female body is clear throughout Presence, both in her personal stories and her historical research. I found the first chapter, about food, and the last chapters, about desire and death, to be the most enlightening and heartfelt of the book. I could definitely see myself returning to this if I was working on a project surrounding the female body, as this is some of the most comprehensive and accessible research I’ve encountered on the subjects Maglaque touches on.

Thanks to NetGalley and Astra Publishing House for the arc!

This book was both fascinating and infuriating. An impressively accessible dive into the different versions of the historical female body and how they have changed over time. Not a lot has been written or researched on the subject, so the book felt like an ode to the seen and unseen work women and their bodies do in all stages of life. I learned a lot and loved the author's personal inputs.

Link to my review on Storygraph https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/ef90c676-43ae-4e32-ad65-06c6bb4fa57a

Will be posting about it on my tiktok as well: @carostidbits and writing about it on my blog: carostidbits.substack.com

Looking forward to the physical copy!

Each chapter taught me more about things I didn't know about my own female body. Each historical fact, mixed with the author's own history, made this novel a gripping piece of revelation.

Starting this review with a quote from this book:
“There was a fundamental distrust of what happened inside the female body; external evidence not required.

Oh how this still rings true, even 500 years later.

There was so much history built into this book from the 1400s to present day. I appreciated the mix of personal anecdotes and historical evidence, but I felt the pacing of the book would’ve benefited from more depth on the personal side. At times it felt like we were jumping from historical quote to historical quote with no context as to why; a way of dumping a ton of data into one chapter.

Chapter 3 was the most intriguing, as Maglaque delves into the history of “unpregnancy” and how people assume society was always against it. That wasn’t always the case, even in the Catholic church who became much more strict on the subject in the late 1500s.

The chapters on sleep and desire were two of my favorites; they were fascinating and relatable and although these are biological forces, the way we approach them has changed so much throughout history.

The epilogue perfectly wrapped the book up, and brought the reason for the research full circle. It was about the risk of being present, the risk of searching for more, the risk of being curious. The word ‘presence’ permeated through the book and it not only referenced the presence of others throughout a woman’s history, but the presence of oneself while experiencing these phenomena.

Thank you to Astra House and NetGalley for the advanced reader copy!!

Presence details the history of the female body by discussing topics of eating, pregnancy, abortion, birth, sleep, breastfeeding, desire, drudgery and dying. This book dives into historical facts around these topics but also discusses the authors personal experiences. People in the past especially men believed strange things about women regarding their bodies and this is a fascinating look at how certain beliefs have changed.

I enjoyed reading this and I had a good time learning the historical beliefs about women’s bodies. This is written well and even when I wasn’t the most interested in a topic I still found this compelling. I liked learning about the historical beliefs regarding pregnancy specifically what made a fetus human and the changing beliefs on fat/thin bodies. I think this book also shows how connections can be made to anything and at the time it will make sense. For example, in the past some people believed conditions a wet nurse had would be transferred to the child and at the time that easily made sense to people. I will be recommending this and I really appreciate what this author had to say on their experience of being a woman.

WOW! I am absolutely impressed with this book!
Because of the references to the 1600-1700s I was worried this book would fly over my head, but Erin Maglaque does a fantastic job of drawing parallels to the past with her own modern reflections on life as a AFAB Woman. From birth to breastfeeding to female desire , Maglaque paints a beautiful yet somber portrait of how the world has evolved through patriarchal ways.
I learned so much from this book & honestly can’t wait to buy a hard copy when it releases. I don’t know if i have read a book that so seamlessly marries two time periods!

Part-memoir, part-history, Maglaque’s
experience of pregnancy and mothering was the catalyst for delving into pre-modern Western Europe to uncover women’s understandings of, and writings about, their bodies - from birth to death and everything in-between.

I thoroughly enjoyed this necessary and urgent history, which provides a stunning corrective to both the theory of mind-body dualism and the invented ‘tradition’ currently being conjured to support efforts to legislate away women’s rights.

Drawing on women’s voices from diaries, letters and Court transcripts, as well as writings about women, Maglaque’s work is both theoretical and earthy, prompting introspection on how we have come to view ourselves and our role as women. I found it incredibly powerful to connect with and relate to the women Maglaque mentions as examples (and the many entirely absent from the historical record) and consider the differences and similarities in our lives, governed as they are by our bodies.

The book was interesting and accessible, well-structured, and cohesive. It would be a great fit for anyone who enjoys social history, or wants to understand women’s interiority in pre-modern Western Europe.

Very interesting history of women’s bodies presented in an accessible way. This is an important addition to feminist non-fiction. The author seamlessly weaves in her own experiences with her body. It is dense with history, so don’t try to read it all in one sitting. It is totally worth the read!

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

Some sections were slower for me, especially when the historical discussion became very dense, but overall I found the book rewarding and original. It made me think differently about everyday experiences like illness, care, and physical vulnerability, and how these have been shaped by culture and power.. Thanks for the ARC to the publisher and NetGalley.

An interesting work blending fact and personal experience to discuss woman’s bodies and how it is portrayed in the world around us.

An informative and engaging read, which is a strong addition to feminist non-fiction. Maglaque's exploration of women's bodies is well navigated, and the memoir section is neatly woven in and nicely balanced with the history and societal information. It is well-written and does not get lost in the historical detail and case studies, which would be easy to do! Compelling and eye-opening, this is an impressive debut!

Presence gives the history of the female body through early modern accounts of women's daily lives and experiences and memoir. Erin Maglaque blends historical texts and lived experiences to explore topics such as beauty standards, sex, and pregnancy throughout the last 400-500 years. I'm not too familiar with early modern history, so it was fascinating to read about common beliefs such as having a birthmark would transfer to a baby and pregnant women should be given whatever they want to avoid disaster (which, let's face it, still should be the case). Some things were so absurd to think about, while others were strangely similar to life today.

Thank you to @netgalley and @astrapublishinghouse for the opportunity to read and review this book, out June 16th!

I really appreciate you providing a copy of Presence for me to review! I really liked this book, and I thought it did an excellent job of blending personal experience with deep historical research to create a truly liberating look at the female body.

Here are a few things that stood out to me:

Unique Structure: Framing the book as a biography of the author’s own body makes the entire book feel incredibly intimate and grounded. I really found this perspective interesting.

The Fresh Historical Perspective: I loved the exploration of the "premodern past"—it offers a much more expansive and forgiving way to think about our bodies than our modern views do.

Thoughtful Dialogue: The way the author connects her own experiences with motherhood, care-giving, and loss to the lives of women from centuries ago is really moving and I think it will connect deeply with readers.

I really appreciate the opportunity to read this book early and I will be recommending it to all my friends and followers! Thanks again!

Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body by Erin Maglaque is an intellectually rigorous and deeply compelling work that makes a significant contribution to feminist historiography, the history of medicine, and embodied epistemology. Blending archival research with personal narrative, Maglaque offers a sustained challenge to the presumed universality of mind–body dualism, demonstrating how historically contingent—and politically loaded—our modern understandings of bodily authority truly are.

Structured as a “biography” of the author’s body, Presence moves through girlhood, sexual maturity, abortion, pregnancy, lactation, care work, and death, placing these experiences into dialogue with premodern European sources. What distinguishes this work is not merely its interdisciplinary ambition, but the sophistication with which Maglaque treats women’s bodily experiences as sites of knowledge production rather than anecdote. Drawing on court records, medical texts, religious writings, and women’s own accounts, she reconstructs a world in which the female body was understood as porous, intelligent, and responsive—capable of thought, memory, and moral reasoning.

Maglaque’s historical analysis is careful and precise, resisting the temptation to romanticise the premodern past. Instead, she foregrounds contradiction: a world that could simultaneously sustain expansive theories of embodiment and justify profound bodily control over women. Particularly strong are her chapters on “unpregnancy,” maternal imagination, sleep, and desire, which illuminate how moral panic, theological doctrine, and emerging medical authority converged to produce lasting frameworks of suspicion around women’s interiority.

The memoir elements are not decorative but methodologically integral. By situating her own embodied experiences alongside historical material, Maglaque enacts the very argument the book advances: that knowledge is produced through lived, gendered bodies, and that detachment has never been neutral. This approach aligns Presence with contemporary feminist philosophical work such as The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan and Everybody by Olivia Laing, while remaining firmly grounded in historical scholarship.

Lucid, humane, and theoretically assured, Presence is an outstanding scholarly work with wide relevance across gender studies, history, and medical humanities. It is both an academic achievement and a necessary corrective to narrow accounts of the female body—one that will reward careful, sustained reading.

Great account of how history has treated women and women’s body for granted. How they are always present, and expected to be so. How their presence and work is most often unpaid. How most times it is men deciding what women can and cannot do or be. Great account that most people should read. The book was also well structure and engagingly written, very good overall.

I greatly enjoyed this thoughtful and provoking look at women's experiences of intimate and embodied moments throughout history. The author is able to juxtapose her own experiences with food, caring for relatives, clothing with the experiences she has found in the records. Each chapter is a self-contained exploration of one area of life. The author takes you through Western history, how place and time meant different experiences of living and dying as a woman. There are so many fascinating details here that I look forward to reading it again.

really really interesting. there’s nothing else like it in regards to subject matter which serves to underscore the purpose for which it was written in the first place. i loved the last chapter, about death. it was exclusively about the history of women in christian europe, and i would’ve liked to see anything at all about women from other parts of the world.

I am always attracted to books that look at topics I wouldn’t normally read about so when this ARC popped up, I was immediately intrigued (my thanks to NetGalley and Astra Publishing House). It turned out to be an exceptional read.

The author, in her debut book, is on the faculty at the University of Sheffield, England, and offers a fascinating study of women using her own body “as the template.” Drawing on historical, artistic, midwifery journals, legal, scientific and “household guide” sources, we get a bird’s eye view of women’s experiences and self imagineds between 1500 to 1800. This was a period of “profound change” for women and during which men also took over things like births, normally handled by midwives. Another example , in the 16th C it was thought a woman needed to experience organism to conceive by the 18th C it was argued organism didn’t exist.

The book examines birth, abortion, miscarriage, breast feeding, house work and care for the dying. As on French memoirist, Madame de Roland, wrote in the 18th C, about breastfeeding: “In truth, looking at the matter closely, nursing a baby is a course in morals, and I think some women do well not to try it.” Also before the 18th C, sex was non-penetrative, by the end it was penetrative. We get our sexual proclivities from this century. Loved Chapter 8 entitled “A History of Durdgery.” This chapter actually explores women working on textiles and how to keep white linen clean.

There are wonderful paintings and illustrations in the book showing women in various poses and ways of life. This added nicely to historical tale being offered in this book. Highly recommend.

Early Modern historian Erin Maglaque has written a phenomenal debut that details the history of the female body, using the body – including her own – as both the subject and the method. She scoured archival materials, including letters, diaries, cookbooks, pamphlets, and more, to find women’s voices, bodies and experiences. While it was a challenge, the outcome is a stunning examination of women’s bodies through their endless searching, movement, restlessness and patterns.

See the full review in the Summer 2026 issue of Ms. magazine.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for this eArc in exchange for an honest review.

Non fiction is definitely not my bread and butter but women’s history definitely is.

While at times the info-dump was really strong the author did a lot of research that made me want to look further into each source she credited to become more learned.

I would recommend this as a book to have and pick up and put down rather then read all the way through because of the sheer amount of references that don’t always follow a nice “story” line

The book is going to be archived before I have the chance to finish it, but wanted to review what I have read before it does (I hope that's ok!) I've really been enjoying Presence. It's been a slow read for me, taking my time to understand things and constantly getting distracted, in a great way, as it's sparked so many ideas in my own fiction and non-fiction writing.
I love the way its written, these kind of mixes of historical and personal writing are always something I enjoy and Maglaque explores so much with so much nuance through that style.
It's accessible and interesting and filling a gap in research that is definitely needed! I found the history of pregnancy so compelling, which was unexpected to me, but the history surrounding community and folklore etc was so intriguing.
There's so much in this book that has not seen the light of day elsewhere and I will definitely be purchasing and recommending it to those around me!

Despite this being nonfiction, it was almost like a mystical read. The last time I felt like a book forced me to sit with my body and womanhood was when I read the Vagina Monologues when I was 18. I enjoyed it very much and despite it not being quite a 5 star read for me I plan on buying a copy, especially the US version which has a much more beautiful and elegant cover than the UK's.

The book Presence gathered a few threads and wove them into an enlightening read. Definitely a starting point for people who want to gain more knowledge on the history of Western (and westernized) women’s bodies.