Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present
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 by Anna Burel, 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.
“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“
Conceiving Histories exhibition, Peltz Gallery, London, November 2017
Anna Burel is an artist based in London.
Anna’s practice focuses on women’s bodily experience and more specifically reproductive health in the present and the past. She has been working in collaboration Dr Isabel Davis (Natural History Museum) since 2015 on two projects about fertility health: Conceiving Histories with an illustrated history book coming out in February 2025, published by MIT Press, and (Mis)Conceptions, an ongoing public engagement project housed a the Natural History Museum in London.