Erin Maglaque’s new book, *Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body*, offers an expansive exploration of European women’s experiences from roughly 1500 to 1800, a period marked by profound social and intellectual transformation. Drawing on an array of archival fragments, Maglaque seeks to reconstruct a nuanced history of women’s interior lives and bodily experiences during the early modern era, a time when cultural attitudes toward gender, personhood, and beauty were actively being reshaped.

Maglaque frames her study around the enduring paradox that while womanhood is ubiquitous and central to human history, women’s voices and experiences from this period remain scarce and often illegible in traditional archives. In part, this reflects the metaphor of “writing in white ink” — a concept borrowed from the French critic Hélène Cixous — illustrating how women’s stories were often literally erased or rendered invisible by historical record-keeping systems dominated by men.

To address these absences, Maglaque gathers diverse sources including diaries, letters, recipe books, trial testimonies, medical treatises, botanical catalogs, and funeral sermons. She highlights individuals such as a 17th-century English midwife, a nun in Perugia who documented recipes for her convent, and a teenage servant from a noble household, using these examples to draw out “particular shadows” — traces of lived experience that resist broad generalization yet reveal rich, often contradictory insights into daily life and female embodiment. Her analysis pays close attention to language, silences, metaphor, and social context to read beyond what is explicitly recorded.

The book situates these personal narratives within larger historical shifts, including the rise of reason over superstition and upheavals that challenged traditional monarchies and social orders. Maglaque interrogates assumptions that scientific and cultural advances automatically yielded greater empathy or autonomy for women. Instead, she illustrates how many modern ideas surrounding beauty, gender roles, sexuality, and identity crystallized in this era. For instance, ideals of female beauty evolved from celebrating “abundance and fertility” to emphasizing refinement and self-control by the late 18th century. Meanwhile, persistent beliefs about pregnancy linked maternal emotions and cravings to the physical markings and health of the unborn child, with town councils imposing restrictions to protect expectant mothers from social contact with beggars and the diseased.

Maglaque’s narrative blends historical scholarship with personal reflection, as she connects past and present through accounts of childbirth, desire, and motherhood. She recalls her grandmother’s cooking and self-denial, the trauma of her own labor, and the enduring realities of female caregiving, fatigue, and loss. At the same time, her research recounts harsher realities including witch hunts and outdated medical practices like bloodletting.

The author acknowledges the limitations of reconstructing women’s histories from fragmentary evidence. Many voices remain forever lost—those who lacked the means or social permission to write, whose records have been destroyed, or whose experiences were deemed too taboo to document. Yet, Maglaque treats these absences as meaningful too, underscoring the challenges and gaps that persist in recovering women’s bodily histories.

*Presence* offers a rigorous, empathetic, and deeply textured portrait of early modern womanhood that invites readers to reconsider how historical silences shape contemporary understandings of gender and identity. Through her meticulous archival work and introspective prose, Maglaque illuminates the complexities of female experience across centuries, affirming the importance of pursuing stories “written in white ink” even when they can only be glimpsed in fragments.