With the same sensitivity to gender issues shown in Domestic Dangers, Laura Gowing's second monograph shifts focus from the verbal to the physical worlds of early modern women. In her introduction, she explains that historians such as Norbert Elias have ignored gender as a factor in the story of the civilization of the body. Common Bodies redresses this important oversight, revealing the female body as contested terrain in seventeenth-century England. Six chapters explore contemporary perceptions of the female body as well as women's experience of their own bodies.

Gowing uncovers the popular sense of sex difference that coexisted with the elite medical view of the same-sex body. With various anecdotes from cheap print and court testimony, she reveals that early modern men and women were able to imagine the vagina “in graphic terms” (27). Their imaginations were informed by situations where women's bodies were, willingly or unwillingly, exposed to their gaze. Distinct spaces in the early modern world provided avenues for such glimpses: the intimate domestic spaces in which servants worked or mothers had their lyings-in, marketplaces where pickpockets reached for purses concealed under petticoats, even taverns and byways where women exposed themselves to a shocked male audience.

Common Bodies explores the apparently contradictory notions that women were both lusty and passive sexual partners. Early modern medical discourse told women that they needed sex to balance their humors and that orgasm was necessary for conception, yet contemporaries tended to describe women as the passive partner in heterosexual encounters. In popular parlance, women were “occupied,” “used,” or “carnally known,” and many prided themselves upon their lack of desire a full century before historians chart the shift toward an asexual, maternal femininity. Gowing argues that, at the physical level, seventeenth-century sex was always about masculine initiative rather than female agency, and though there are accounts of women enjoying sex, their eagerness was culturally understood as shameful.

The chapters exploring pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood are particularly valuable as an alternative to feminist histories that romanticize early modern women's experiences in contrast to those of modern women. Chapter 4 offers the particularly fascinating insight that social pressures over prenatal care “worked in the seventeenth century, as they do now, to control women's bodies and undermine women's autonomy” (122). This chapter explodes another myth: that the role of technology and medicine in modern pregnancy and childbirth has alienated women from their bodies more than their early modern counterparts, who were free from such interventions. In fact, Gowing argues, magistrates, putative fathers, midwives, and other women all served in their own way to complicate expectant mothers’ experiences of childbirth and labor. In addition, histories that assume that barrenness was the ultimate curse of the seventeenth-century woman ignore female servants and prostitutes, and Common Bodies presents several examples of such women who gloried in their infertility.

Laura Gowing's claim that her history of the body applies to all women is somewhat exaggerated, but as a history of single or transgressive women, her study is invaluable. Although the book devotes some space to women in conventional marital relationships, this history of the body is much more about extremes. Bodily experiences of illegitimacy, rape, adultery, and other forms of illicit sex appear on its pages far more often than those of matrons and maids whose chastity remained intact outside of marriage. This is unavoidable for any historian, however, as sources depicting the former are much more prevalent than those of the latter. In addition, Gowing observes that these women on the margins constituted a significant segment of seventeenth-century society. At a time when political and conduct literature connected the family to the state and made the identity of obedient wife and nurturing mother the highest goal of femininity, rising ages of marriage, disparate sex ratios, and a changing labor market prevented many English women from ever reaching that ideal. Gowing brings their stories to the fore admirably.

The book builds upon her previous findings that the all-female environment of the lying-in chamber was a center of conflict rather than unification for unwed mothers or known adulterers and that other women willingly enforced patriarchal concerns over infanticide and illegitimacy. Bastard-bearing mothers’ bodies were subject to the intrusions of others in determining pregnancy, giving birth, and in procuring poor relief after the baby was born. Labor pains were used as leverage to determine the true identity of the father. Parish relief was contingent upon mothers’ willingness to breast-feed or—in extreme cases—to abandon the illegitimate baby and face condemnation as “an unnatural mother.”

Gowing could be commended for her research alone. Common Bodies draws upon an impressive volume and range of primary sources. Manuscript court records, letter collections, diaries, and notebooks have been drawn from archives across England. These are accompanied by numerous printed ballads, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. However, Laura Gowing rarely openly considers the role of authorship and mediation in interpreting many of these sources. Her use of jest books, for example, would have benefited from some discussion of the identity of the author and the probable sources of his material, not to mention some contextualization of humor. Ballads, too, had a commercial significance that must be considered in their interpretation. Readers who appreciated Gowing's careful narrative of the legal processes behind the creation of the depositions that formed the source base of Domestic Dangers will not find a similar treatment of the extensive legal sources used in Common Bodies. There nonetheless remains little question that Gowing has successfully extracted an overall sense of popular attitudes toward women's bodies.

One of the most significant contributions of the book is its hundreds of anecdotes of everyday life, and its ability to reveal basic physical experiences that are often lost in analytical histories. Early modern women did not wear underwear, they slept with other servants, their nipples were damaged by corsets so they could not breast-feed. Common Bodies is a rich social history, where the physical world of objects and biological function can be understood within a mental world of power and social relations. By marrying gender analysis with the history of material culture, Gowing has filled an important historiographical gap.