We are thrilled to welcome Erin Maglaque to Juno to celebrate the launch of her new book, Presence A Hidden History of the Female Body.
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 – birthing, caring, working, desiring. Reaching deep into the shared history of women’s lives, Presence points towards a radical new way of understanding our bodies today.
Erin Maglaque is a writer and historian. She earned her PhD from the University of Oxford, and now teaches history at Durham University. Erin writes regularly about history, gender, and feminism for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. Presence is her first book.
Erin will be speaking to Mirela Ivanova: a lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield. She researches and teaches the history of the pre-modern Balkans, Russia and Turkey, and has a particular interest in the pre-modern history of gender, sexuality and race
Juno Books is a very small venue, and we will do our best to meet particular requirements. Accessibility information can be found here.
If you have any accessibility requirements or questions please email us at hello@junobooks.co.uk
(Author photo credit: Emma Ledwith)