The story of the creation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden because of the guile of a talking snake, is one of the most powerful origin myths in the long history of storytelling. It encourages us to ask fundamental questions about the created world and its creator, and the nature of men and women and their responsibility for the loss of Eden. Early commentators were quick to blame Eve for the Fall. Making use of misogynistic stereotypes, they cast her as morally defective from the start. Adam, they argued, was made in the image of God while Eve was made in Adam’s image and was therefore inferior. He came first; she came second. She was fashioned out of Adam’s left rib and was therefore somehow innately deviant or sinister. She brought Original Sin into the world.
In seventeenth-century England, a period of intense political debate that would culminate in the Civil Wars and the beheading of a king, pamphleteers and poets revisited the story of the Fall to interrogate social hierarchies. Significantly, women now contributed to the debate in print. In this seminar we will explore Rachel Speght’s and Ester Sowernam’s prose defences of Eve, written in response to Joseph Swetnam’s attack of 1615. This will serve as a context for the treatment of the Fall in the poetry of Speght, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton among others. How did Eve’s daughters and sons defend the mother of mankind?
Recommended primary texts
The Bible (King James Version, 1611). Genesis, chapters 1-3.
Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. Ed. Susanne Woods. Oxford UP, 1993. Paperback.
Rachel Speght, The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght. Ed. Barbara K. Lewalski. Oxford UP, 1996. Paperback. ‘A Mouzell for Melastomus’ and ‘A Dream’.
John Milton, Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. Norton Critical Editions. 2004. Paperback. Extracts from Books II, IV, VIII, IX and X.
- Enseignant·e: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar