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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. And this week I'm speaking with Erin McGlucky who teaches history at Sheffield University. This is her second

appearance on the LRB podcast. Nearly a year ago, she wrote an

eerily prescient piece on the lockdown imposed by the city of Florence when Plague came to Italy

in 1630, and we discussed that last March. Since then, she has written on Machiavelli and

Fernon Baudel, and she has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on abortion in early modern Italy.

It's a review of a book of that title by John Christopoulos, published this month by Harvard University Press.

Hello, Erin, and thank you very much for joining me again.

Hi, Tom, it's really, really nice to be back.

As with your quarantine piece last year, there are some startling similarities between then and now,

as well as some striking differences.

And in some respects, you suggest the way people thought about abortion 400 years ago

was perhaps preferable to the way people think about it now, and we'll come onto that.

But perhaps we should begin with some of the cases, some of the women's stories that Christopoulos has unearse, mostly from court records,

which all seem more or less horrifying to me, though.

I don't know if that's just my male squeamishness.

...