“History is good at the particular,” writes Erin Maglaque, a scholar of early modern Europe. Particularity about the past is certainly the outstanding virtue of her book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body. Armed with impressive erudition and a sharp eye for the telling anecdote, Maglaque accumulates a massive collection of details about women’s lives across three centuries (1500-1800 CE) and several western European regions. She shows us women labouring (in both senses of the word), desiring, dying and tending to the dead; making milk and cloth; defending themselves against witchcraft accusations; having, losing, and aborting pregnancies.
Some of the stories she has unearthed approach the haunting and timeless status of folklore – such as that of Marie-Joseph Dahl, a late-18th-century farm worker in rural Brittany who falls in love with her boss’s son. Dahl makes a deal with her boss that if she reaps an entire wheat field alone in three days, she can marry her beloved. She succeeds in performing this Herculean feat, but the father reneges. The betrayed woman refuses food for 11 years, surviving only because the farmer breaks her teeth in order to force feed her water and honey. At her best, Maglaque recounts tribulations such as Dahl’s without judgement or lamentation; under her almost clinical treatment, their particularity shines.
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