Erin Maglaque

Erin Maglaque is a historian at Sheffield. Venice's Intimate Empire came out in 2018.

Promises, Promises: The Love Plot

Erin Maglaque, 21 April 2022

Poor Emma Bovary​, nourished on stories of ‘love affairs, lovers, mistresses, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely country houses … dark forests, palpitating hearts, vows, sobs, tears and kisses … gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs’, fancied her husband-to-be a ‘white-plumed rider on a black horse’. He turned out to be dull as dishwater....

Pigs, Pre-Roasted: Lazy-delicious-land

Erin Maglaque, 16 December 2021

It was good​ to be a butcher in Antwerp. The Butchers’ Guild was one of the oldest in the city and membership was hereditary: the names of the 62 old butchering families were inscribed in the guild’s Lineage Book. Turned out in blood-red tunics, the butchers spent the morning trading cattle at the Ossenmarkt, or selling sausages and offal in the Vleeshuis, the butchers’...

According​ to Jeremias Drexel, who published a guide to notetaking in 1641, reading well was as effortful as goldmining – and potentially as enriching. His book, the Aurifodina, was illustrated with a frontispiece showing two kinds of work. On the left, miners raise picks high over their heads, chipping gold from the rock. On the right, a scholar bends over his desk, carefully...

Like a Slice of Ham: Unpregnancy

Erin Maglaque, 4 February 2021

Thepro-choice case for abortion rights rests partly on the possessive pronoun. My body, my choice. Keep your rosaries off my ovaries. These slogans are predicated on the idea that a woman owns her internal organs, and that this ownership is what entitles her to make decisions about them. I once accepted this idea without much thought. Then I had an abortion. It was my abdomen under the...

Down with Occurrences: Baroque Excess

Erin Maglaque, 3 December 2020

FernandBraudel’s wife, Paule, remembered sitting with him on a wintry day at a café in Dubrovnik in the 1930s, watching a boat laden with firewood slowly coming into the port. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we are in the 16th century.’ It was this sense of historical time that gave Braudel’s masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences