Magisterial in reach and outlook, Stephen Greenblatt's The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is “a life history” (2) distinguished by a compendium of finely nuanced, often jostling perspectives, including a valuable appendix, “A Sampling of Interpretations” (303–10). This history epitomizes what Greenblatt's own narrative illustrates, the “enduring power of human storytelling” (5), achieving its apogee under the aegis of Dürer, Michelangelo, and Milton. Individually conferring a haunting reality on Adam and Eve, these avatars of Renaissance culture animate our first parents and, simultaneously, reveal them as “the holotype of humanity” (11). Importantly, cracks in the Creation story, once attributed to Milton's artistic failures, now emerge as features inherent in the Genesis tradition itself. Milton achieves a privileged place in Greenblatt's book, where chapters focusing on Saint Augustine (5–6) and Dürer (8) may be second to Milton; but Milton, the subject of three gripping chapters (9–11), is second to none—as powerful an influence on the Bible as the Bible had been on him; no less striking than the Bible as a conduit for the Genesis story; and the author of a poem notable for frustrating tensions skillfully exposed and audaciously displayed within a poem rife with ethical complexity and theological brooding.

Milton threads into his epic the strands of a story with which he composes, corrects, and then cuts or splices inherited material, deleting here, supplementing there, adjudicating elements, harmonizing some, letting others collide, in the process illuminating, indeed spotlighting, fault lines and tensions. Greenblatt's Milton may be too much a hostage to the orthodoxies of Christian tradition, but Greenblatt also knows “how … you uproot deeply held beliefs”: “You change the story” (34). If Milton lets his characters negotiate theological problems for themselves, Greenblatt, correspondingly, leaves his readers scrutinizing Milton's revisionary alterations and unpacking their significance.

The redemptive role associated by typological tradition with the First and Second Adams migrates to Eve in the final books of Paradise Lost where, additionally, the prophetic function once attributed to Adam by Islamic exegetes shifts to Eve. Seemingly silenced by sleep, Eve, upon awakening, takes on heroic stature as, oracularly, she comprehends the prophecy of the Chosen Seed and as, symbolically, she is exalted to the role of epic hero. Eve thus becomes the segue from a poem, which pays scant attention to the Crucifixion story, to its companion piece, Paradise Regained, which, scuttling the Crucifixion story, proceeds with an account of Jesus tempted and its assurance that paradise is regained in the desert. Eve may have been the first to fall, but in Paradise Lost she also initiates the process of redemption.

If Adam was crafted from clay, Eve was fashioned from the nobler substance of Adam's rib with Adam eventually celebrating her as both summation and masterpiece of Creation. Milton's Pauline narrator may subscribe to the biblical adage that Eve alone is deceived only to be challenged not just by Satan in both Milton's epics, but then by God himself as he insists in Paradise Lost that “man falls deceived” (3.130). More of a thorn in the side of Christian orthodoxy than Greenblatt acknowledges, Milton adds potency to his version of the Creation story as he purges it of “misogynistic materials” (211), but just as remarkably confronts patriarchy and courts feminism. If Greenblatt stumbles, it is when he tries to square Milton's supposed “superiority … principle of the male over the female … with what it actually felt like to love someone” (220). In the end, though, Greenblatt is unflagging in his insistence that “Adam and Eve … crack open the whole theological apparatus that brought them into being… . The triumph of literature,” he concludes, “came at a theological cost” (228).

In the long view, Paradise Lost is prologue to a fraught history of theological challenges that, initiated by Milton, crest in Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859). Greenblatt traces this tangled history from Isaac La Peyrere, through Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, and their Enlightenment project, to Darwin himself, who, when he could take on his voyages but a single volume, always chose Paradise Lost. Throughout this book, with so much to be digested by Miltonists, Greenblatt thinks wisely, seldom with curbed imagination, and always states immensely.