Talking about the book

(updated updated May 2025) Getting out the message about a new book mostly means podcasts, I’ve found. That’s great because you can do the recording from your home, and also podcast hosts are generally very lively and so the level of energy is high. So here is a short list of the ones I’ve done so far on Immaculate Forms, as well as some in-person/online events and some BBC Radio pieces which are available on BBC Sounds.

30 August 2024: ‘Women are wet and spongy, the history of the female body’, ‘Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby’ on https://open.spotify.com/episode/2qxLQ4yLQbkM4EgcUsd9pS

Conversations: Women Are Wet & Spongy, the History of the Female Body w/ Prof Helen King Episode · Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! Greek & Roman Mythology Retold · Liv speaks with Professor Helen King about her new book Immaculate Forms, and the history of the female body.

4 September 2024: A Seat at the Table (Spare Ribs Club) https://open.spotify.com/show/3uKjtMcGxc9nltQ3RyXuxx?si=c77b9df73a514dd3&nd=1&dlsi=c651c208a4554f69

A Seat At The TablePodcast · [object Object] · A Seat At The Table brings together feminism, female friendship and food. Every episode Alex invites guests to take us through their perfect feminist dinner party; 3 feminist icons as dinner guests, 3 courses, and 3 tunes being played on repeat.

And on UK publication day, 5 September 2024, I spoke about the book on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour; that was live, but it’s amazing how much energy being live can give you; https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0022kv6

6 September 2024: Kate Lister’s ‘Betwixt the Sheets’ episode; https://shows.acast.com/betwixt-the-sheets/episodes/what-the-ancient-greeks-got-wrong-about-the-female-body

20 September 2024: Interview with my fellow-Synod member, Father Alex Frost, where we range very widely indeed, on The God Cast; https://youtu.be/6YD_mKvhYWw?si=YRYhZOLMFfbJVQ1v

30 September 2024: Not specifically book-focused because this was an interview I did a very long time ago with Rob Cain, but it finally went live on his Ancient Rome Refocused: there’s some chat about The Open University and the ancient medical section starts about 28 minutes in and ranges from Roman army medicine to midwives and women as doctors in the ancient world; https://robbycainiii.podbean.com/e/medicine-in-the-ancient-world-epi46-s7

2 October 2024: Wellcome Collection ran an event with me as part of a panel on ‘Women and Work’, thinking through the issues around their exhibition, ‘Hard Graft’. I had do to that remotely due to a back pain flare-up but they were, thankfully, able to adjust. It’s not the same as being in the room, but it was still very interesting for me. Unedited video is on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbzQvtSWTxo

3 October 2024: with Diarmaid MacCulloch, I did a live event in Oxford at the University Church in which we talked about our books and answered questions. While there wasn’t a recording, on 4 October the Church Times published a piece they’d commissioned from me, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2024/4-october/features/features/uncovering-the-history-of-women-s-bodies, which is relevant to some of what I said in Oxford.

11 November 2024: again with Diarmaid, and also with Ruth Padel, back on BBC Radio 4 for an episode of Start the Week on ‘Sex and Christianity’. Of course I already knew Diarmaid, but I also know Ruth from many years ago when she was a lecturer in Classics. I loved her new collection of poems, Girl, and there were all sorts of connections between our books, so this was great fun! It’s available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0024w7d

And then… I was invited to take part in a special episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage, ‘An Unexpected History of the Body’, recorded live at the Royal Society. It was the best possible fun working with their special combination of comedians and scientists, and we went off on all sorts of unexpected tangents. I learned a lot! Broadcast on Boxing Day 2024, it’s available on https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025dvv

While most podcasts are timed to go live at publication, that doesn’t always work. So, the very first of the UK podcasts I recorded was for BBC History Extra, and that one only went live on 20 January 2025. I don’t think it had anything like the energy of the pieces recorded once I’d got into my stride, but it’s on https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/history-extra-podcast/id256580326?i=1000684407270

And, because Immaculate Forms was published in the US and Canada at the end of January, there are also some American podcasts from the beginning of 2025, first out of the starting gates being Ann Foster’s wonderfully-named Vulgar History, which uses the catchphrase “Tits out” as its highest level of praise; so, unsurprisingly, they liked the chapter on breasts in particular. Then there’s one with Xavier Bonilla for Converging Dialogues and another with Cara Santa Maria, for Talk Nerdy.

Although there should be a huge difference between chatting with one person in a podcast and talking to goodness knows how many people on the radio, a good radio host also gives you that sense of an intimate conversation. Well, it’s better to think like that than to realise how many people are potentially listening! Face to face large audiences like the one at the Royal Society for Infinite Monkey Cage – who’d been queuing for hours just to get in – are good too, although the adrenaline high produced makes it hard to go to sleep afterwards. In April 2025 I was invited to Leiden to speak in a series around their excellent exhibition, ‘Unseen’, which looks at the history of taking the male body as the norm in medicine: I highly recommend this exhibition, which has captions in English as well as Dutch, and has some extraordinary exhibits. Great audience, and I learned a lot! The lecture, ‘The man, the woman, the talking snake and the knife’, is now on YouTube.

I realised that some of the podcasts and other talks repeated the same examples, which is partly because they are really good examples, but also because they are quite concise and there isn’t the opportunity to tell a really long story or to go into lots of detail. So I resolved that if I were asked to do any more I would definitely divert to other parts of the book – because there are 448 pages of it and so there are plenty of other stories I could tell. At the 3 October Oxford live event, I finally got to mention Elena Duglioli’s post-mortem breast milk, and I have written about that as well in a piece on another theme (body parts and my own experience of discovering which ones I have!) which was published in April 2025 on the Nursing Clio blog.

At the Leiden event, and also when I was invited to do an ‘in conversation’ event as the 2025 Annual Chaplaincy Lecture at the University of Reading, I was able to talk more about the ‘religion’ side of the control of women’s bodies. I picked that up for a June 2025 talk at St Paul’s Cathedral on ‘Flourishing?’

There are so many different angles on can take on a book! So for an in-house Open University event for the Gender and Otherness in the Humanities (GOTH) group and for the EuGeStA network I was able to chat about the whole process of presenting research for a general audience, because that may help other people who are interested in venturing into the world of ‘trade books’. But I still haven’t aired my thoughts on Maud Allan and the ‘cult of the clitoris’ (although ‘Start the Week’ did get to the related story about someone asking ‘Who is this Greek chap, Clitoris?’). And I still haven’t had the chance to talk about Princess Marie Bonaparte having her clitoris moved …