Brian Murdoch's book, The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe, marks the latest in his over forty-year interest in the medieval popular Bible and interpretations of Adam and Eve. The book focuses on translations and adaptations of the Latin version of “The Life of Adam and Eve” (“Vita Adae et Evae”), which Murdoch identifies as a “Christian apocryphon involving Old Testament characters” (256). Its themes, especially in its various vernacular translations and adaptations, include the origins of human life, penance, and the prophecy of redemption (viii). Murdoch's examination of VAE is important for several reasons. First of all, as Murdoch rightly notes, there has not been much attention paid to the interpretive lives of apocryphal/pseudepigraphical works—especially as represented in vernacular translations. Scholars are often more interested in the Latin text tradition of the VAE than taking into account “the continual development in vernacular writings which are not just descended from, but which develop and augment the Latin” (vii). For Murdoch, the wide variety of languages in which the VAE is found in Western Europe during the Middle Ages is evidence of its importance during this period (252). Moreover, the changes in content and form that take place during this period attest to the “protean manner” in which the tradition develops. This growth is fueled by the fact that “notions of the canonical and apocryphal” were “imprecisely understood” during the Middle Ages (252). According to Murdoch, it was the Renaissance and the Reformation “with their renewed insistence on canonicity and on the establishment of a foundation text for works of antiquity” that, to a large extent, caused this variety to disappear (vii–viii).

Murdoch is also concerned in this book with the question of what constitutes an apocryphal or pseudepigraphic text. For Murdoch, texts (especially before the advent of the printing press) represent a fluid, ever changing, and developing tradition. But it is often the case that when scholars study any ancient text they presume that its “original” (or the text closest to that elusive “original”) is more important than its later interpretive lives. Murdoch argues that not only is discerning the “earliest” representation of any ancient “text” problematic if not impossible, but that vernacular adaptations and translations are just as important as the “originals” from which they were derived (252).

The preface and chapter 1 (“Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, the Adambooks, and the Vita Adae et Evae”) identify and explore key methodological issues and assumptions involved in the study of vernacular translations and adaptations, while chapter 7 (“Litteras Achiliachas: Conclusion”) revisits many of the issues raised at the book's opening pages. These methodological chapters function as literary bookends to the book's core examination of vernacular adaptations and translations in chapters 2–6. Chapters 2–5 categorize these vernacular works by geographical locations: Ireland; England, Wales, and Cornwall; the Holy Roman Empire and beyond; and France, Brittany, and Italy; respectively. But while chapters 2–5 focus on the narrative/verse/drama adaptations of VAE, chapter 6 (“Iconography”) departs from written representation and turns to an examination of visual ones. In conclusion, the book has a useful appendix (“An Overview of the Vernacular Texts”) followed by a bibliography and an index.

Readers who are familiar with works by Gary Anderson, Michael Stone, and Johannes Tromp will appreciate the detail and depth of Murdoch's book. In 1999, Anderson and Stone published A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve: Second Revised Edition (Atlanta: Scholars, 1999), which was a substantial revision of their 1994 book. Both books utilize a synoptic format, but the second edition presents fresh English translations of each of the versions of the Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Armenian, and Georgian versions of VAE along with the original language of each in a facing column. In addition to this, Anderson and Stone, along with Johannes Tromp, published a volume of essays titled Literature on Adam and Eve: Collected Essays (Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha) (Leiden: Brill, 2000). In comparison, Murdoch's 2009 work is significant because it meticulously examines a broader variety of vernacular adaptations of VAE while, at the same time, it presents the reader with an overarching discussion of the methodological issues surrounding apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature.

Of course, covering a myriad of vernacular works carries with it its own limitations—limitations of which Murdoch is well aware. He admits that the texts mentioned in his work “hardly constitutes a complete list” (ix). Moreover, for some of the texts he examined, Murdoch is dependent on the works of others. Although he issues an “authorial apology” about this in his preface, readers should recognize that it would be difficult indeed to be fluent in all of the languages represented in his study. Moreover, some texts, he explains, only survive in a single copy and have proved difficult for him to access (ix). Nevertheless, these limitations should not detract readers from an appreciation of the depth of Murdoch's examination.

There is one aspect of the book that is a bit puzzling to this reviewer. When Murdoch switches from the written to the visual representations of VAE in chapter 6, he goes to great length to paint verbal pictures of its iconography—but he does this without including a single image. One cannot help but think that the chapter would have benefited from actual images as well as their verbal descriptions.

All in all, this book is a valuable read for anyone interested in the history of VAE's reception.