The third chapter addresses the question of pregnant women’s sexual desires, attempting to locate echoes of how early modern women themselves may have thought about sexuality and the state of pregnancy. To do this, I explore the issue of pregnant women’s appetites, and the disorder called pica, which caused women to eat unnatural objects or excessive amounts of food. Revisiting the existing research on the maternal imagination—the theory that women could imprint birthmarks, physically change their foetuses or cause miscarriage, through the force of their imagination—I suggest that we might read accounts of pregnant women’s longings or pica as potential evidence of sexuality. Drawing on feminist and queer historical methodologies, I analyse specific accounts of pregnant women’s appetites for male flesh, to argue that such accounts may reveal glimpses of their desires in this period. While the theory of pregnant longings in the early modern world was often ridiculed, many medical and lay writers argued that pregnant women’s appetites needed to be satisfied, lest the foetus miscarry or be deformed in the womb. Historians have considered how this cultural belief accorded pregnant women some social power, but in this chapter I explore whether cases can also be seen as ‘power’ over desire in a culture which viewed women’s sexuality as excessive and in need of control.