Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present

by Isabel Davis, Anna Burel (Illustrator)

Overview

A fascinating and beautifully illustrated account of trying to conceive in both the past and the present.

Inspired by the author’s own experiences, 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 of Davis’s 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-color illustrations, Conceiving Histories is also a beautiful material object, an intentionally playful antidote and supplement to online search engines—the resort of so many embroiled in fertility challenges.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262381611
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304

About the Author

Isabel Davis leads a research theme on Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum in London, and she is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading.

Anna Burel is a London-based artist and illustrator whose artwork encompasses textiles, sculpture, drawing, photography, and collage. Her work investigates the female bodily experience through an exploration of history and traditional storytelling like myth and fairytale.

Isabel and Anna have worked together since 2015, holding an exhibition of their work in London in 2017.

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction Annunciations
1 Frogs: What your Sex Ed Never Taught You
2 Pads: How to Join the Bump Club
3 Broody Mary: Narrating the In-Between
4 Wind and Waves: How to Self-Help
5 Credit: How the Money Rolls Out
6 Jeux d’esprit: Testing the Limits
7 Wind-Eggs: Conceiving of Things
Conclusion Seeing the Unbecoming
Historical Figures
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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, demystifying, 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

Editorial Reviews

Davis resists a chronological narrative or overarching argument. She wants to reject the idea that the story of conception has a predictable plot. The dreamy, associative nature of the book sinks the reader into the uncertain and indeterminate state of trying to conceive, of early pregnancy, of miscarriage.”
– London Review of Books

From the Publisher