Historian Erin Maglaque has plumbed the archives of early modern Europe to find the traces and shadow traces of female bodies. She read legal treatises and trial records, church and parish records, midwifery manuals, recipe books, prayer books, ballads, letters, diaries and all manner of scribbled marginalia. Her women are easily recognisable in their wants, fears and hopes. What’s different about them is how their emotions and responses were understood. The Cartesian separation between body and mind hadn’t yet happened. A baby’s strawberry-shaped birthmark was not about vascular abnormalities (a 20th-century explanation) but about its mother’s out-of-season craving for the fruit. A midwifery manual therefore had reason to urge women to govern their appetites. Should an expectant mother think of stealing a strawberry, then her child might become a thief as well.

Maglaque is at pains to emphasise the changes inaugurated by the Cartesian split, especially in how we think about cause and influence. A fat baby in medieval or early modern times would have signified plenitude, health, even wealth; in women, as one treatise still had it in the early 18th century, fat ‘beautifies the Body, by hiding the gaping Interstices of the Muscles’. Later in the century, too much flesh became legible as a medical problem. Weighing scales appeared in London coffeehouses in the 1760s, eventually transforming ideas about ‘health’, how a baby should grow and what a woman should be.

Lending the book its creative flair is Maglaque’s insistence on her own body’s ‘presence’, her 21st-century desires and transformations commingling with those she finds in the archives. The volleying between the archives and her own experiences is part of her method, a way to resist the abstractions inaugurated by the