Historian, author, and museum research leader
“A jaw-dropping caper through the history of fertility and infertility, Conceiving Histories made me laugh, cry, and marvel at human imaginations and female ingenuity.”
Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History, Birkbeck, University of London; author of Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence
“Elegant, surprising, and visually lush. Through history, experience, and image, Isabel Davis and Anna Burel offer us a compelling account of pregnancy uncertainty—a kind of pre-maternal memoir presuming no particular outcome.”
Sarah Knott, Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History, University of Oxford; author of Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History
“An immersive, heartfelt history of conceptions and misconceptions, and the uncertain spaces between. Davis makes the past and the present of the 'am-I-aren't-I time' richer, stranger, endlessly pregnant with possibility.”
Richard Barnett, author of The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration
“Intriguing, demystifyng, funny, and smart, Conceiving Histories is the best and most thoughtful company for those who are trying and those who are done trying and everyone in between.”
Emilie Pine, Professor of Modern Drama, University College Dublin; author of Notes to Self
A fascinating and beautifully illustrated account of trying to conceive in both the past and the present.
Inspired by the author's own experience, Conceiving Histories brings together history, personal memoir, and illustration to investigate the culturally hidden experience of trying to conceive. In elegant, engaging prose, Isabel Davis explores the combination of myth, fantasy, science, and pseudo-science that the (un)reproductive body encounters in pursuit of a viable pregnancy. The book chronicles the trying-to-conceive lifecycle arc from sex education at school, through the desire to be a parent, into the specifics of trying and struggling to conceive. It also looks back at conception throughout history to open a new vista on what we live with today.
A central argument in the book is that historical people lived with the unknown just like we do but were more explicitly able to acknowledge it. In an age of assistive reproductive technologies, the act of embracing uncertainty seems difficult. Although the topic of not conceiving is potentially painful, this is not a grim book; more than grief, it is motivated by curiosity, wonder, compassion, and even humor. With 108 full-colour illustrations, Conceiving Histories is also a beautiful material object, an intentionally playful antidote and supplement to Google—the resort of so many embroiled in fertility challenges.