What happened to Adam and Eve after their expulsion from paradise? Where the biblical narrative fell silent apocryphal writings took up this intriguing question, notably including the Early Christian Latin text, the Life of Adam and Eve. This account describes the (failed) attempt of the couple to return to paradise by fasting whilst immersed in a river, and explores how they coped with new experiences such as childbirth and death. Brian Murdoch guides the reader through the many variant versions of the Life, demonstrating how it was also adapted into most western and some eastern European languages in the Middle Ages and beyond, constantly developing and changing along the way. The study considers this development of the apocryphal texts whilst presenting a fascinating insight into the flourishing medieval tradition of Adam and Eve. A tradition that the Reformation would largely curtail, stories from the Life were celebrated in European prose, verse and drama in many different languages from Irish to Russian.

The apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve explores what happened to Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Paradise. Professor Murdoch considers the varied development of the apocryphal material, and presents a fascinating analysis of the flourishing medieval tradition of Adam and Eve, celebrated in European prose, verse, and drama.

The Adam legends are material worth studying for several reasons, not least because they were once so present that they must have been part of the consciousness of everyone in the continent, but for precisely this reason the task of forming a picture of the whole tradition from the transmitted fragments is a jigsaw puzzle which challenges philological method at its best. In this carefully written volume, Brian Murdoch allows the layman to approach these questions with a breadth of perspective which would previously have been much harder work.