Domestic and Material Culture in the Middle English Adam Books

The subject of this essay is the small but significant corpus of medieval English writings that derive ultimately from the Latin Vita Adae et Euae, the apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve, composed, in its current, extant version in perhaps the eighth century.¹ There are some five redactions of the Life of Adam in English, two in verse and three in prose. These translations and adaptations of the Vita Adae date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.² The English Adam books include the Life of Adam from the Auchinleck MS (in rhymed couplets, ca. 1300–25, NW Midlands); the Canticum de creatione (in stanzas, ca. 1375); Þe lyff of Adam and Eue (in the Vernon MS, ca. 1370–90, in prose); the prose version in the Wheatley MS and Harley 4775 (early fifteenth century); and additional prose renderings attached to texts of the Golden Legend.³

One way of understanding this extended, apocryphal story of Adam and Eve is as a work of penance: the “Penitence of Adam.” The so-called Gelasian Decretal may have understood the Vita Adae that way, for the Decretal mentions a “Book which is called the Penitencia Adae” among the biblical apocrypha.⁴ The popularity of the Middle English Adam books has been linked, accurately I believe, with the penitential initiatives of Lateran IV (1215) and related constitutions. Another way to receive the story, which I wish to entertain in this essay, is as a work—works, rather—of medieval realism: a work that fleshes out and elaborates biblical Genesis. If Genesis contains sketchy “firsts”—in the early chapters, the first humans, the first conversations, the first disobedience, the first sibling rivalry, the first murder, the first exile, the first bigamist—the Middle English Adam books show what some of those “firsts” might look like and feel like in realistic settings. My concern in this essay is not with Seth, the ultimate romance hero of the piece—the one who goes on a Galahad-like “quest,” in Esther Quinn’s happy phrase, for the “oil of life.”⁵ My interest is rather with the earlier segments of the story, Adam and Eve’s failed penance and its aftermath, considered not just as a poetic treatise on penance but as a depiction of domestic life and material culture. The fictional development of the first couple’s life, particularly the reactions to their new, reduced circumstances, provides my chief subject matter. This material “attests,” writes Brian Murdoch, an authority on the Adam books, “to a popularity which is easy enough to understand; Adam and Eve are the progenitors of every reader of the text, and their theological significance exists side by side with a human desire to know how they fared in the inhospitable climate of the world.”⁶ In this essay I build upon Murdoch’s studies but also survey issues in the English Adam books that concern domestic culture (Adam and Eve’s form of living and their family relationships) and material culture (the artifacts Adam and Eve produce and what these say about their belief system). I will discuss the common story derived from the Vita Adae but follow discrepancies in the five Middle English Adam book redactions hoping to answer the question, Why were the Adam books popular in the English Middle Ages?

These five similar tales tell the story of Adam and Eve’s postlapsarian existence, with local variations from text to text, from the moment the first parents don fig leaves until their deaths and burials in the Vale of Hebron. The material from the Adam books has loose affiliations with the Genesis sections of world chronicles like Cursor mundi or Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon (translated by John Trevisa), with Mandeville’s Travels, and with vernacular biblical paraphrases like those of the Pearl-poet’s Patience and Cleanness. Adam and Eve in the Adam books do not consistently and allegorically seem to stand for “man” and “woman.” Their stories are told on the literal level, with occasional typological elements, including Michael’s appearance to Eve telling her she is “blessed...