Erin Maglaque and Hannah Dawson: Presence

Erin Maglaque’s first book, Presence, explores the hidden history of the female body through deep archival research: fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries come together to make tangible a vanished past, unfamiliar because of its deliberate suppression.

The artist Celia Paul has described Presence as ‘a landmark book’, which makes the female body in the past ‘real as never before’.

Maglaque was in conversation with Hannah Dawson, a historian of political thought at King’s College London and the editor of The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing.