Stephen Greenblatt

With the insight, eloquence, and erudition that have thrilled hundreds of thousands of readers of his books about Shakespearean England and the Italian Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt now breathes new life into the ancient story of Adam and Eve. He tracks the story's origins back into humanity's deep past and its first written form to the Hebrews' exile in Babylon. He brilliantly animates the sexual and moral conflicts that led Augustine to enshrine it at the center of Christian faith. He limns its diverse offspring: rich allegory, vicious misogyny, and, finally, astonishing artistic representation--brought most miraculously to life in the Renaissance in Durer's etchings and Milton's Paradise Lost. Greenblatt awakens us to the strangeness and wealth of a tale that generation after generation have found profoundly meaningful. While it was once mortally dangerous to question the story's literal truth, we now turn to science to explain human origins. What has been gained and sacrificed as tellings and interpretations of the story of our first human ancestors evolved through Western culture? Returning to us a precious cultural inheritance, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is an exploration of the value of the humanities through the life of one of humankind's greatest stories.

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