Sight seeing in Alsace

A holiday in Alsace, in the celebrated village of Riquewihr. All new to me, and stemming from a recommendation from a cycling friend years ago.

Alsace reminded me in some ways of Belgium: a place that has had the tides of history sweep through it, yet remained itself. The gabled, ornamented architecture of a prosperous merchant class, a religious rubbing-along when money is to be made, the superlative artists brought to that area by that disposable wealth and taste for ostentation. The vigneron who lived in one fine house in Riquewihr had himself depicted being pulled away from his agreeable existence by Death (rather than the end of his week in a gite):

There's a fine tradition of shop signs:

This statue in Colmar is of Schwendi, excitedly brandishing not one of his weapons, but roots of the Tokay vine, which he'd brought back from a campaign in Hungary. That's a very Alsatian thing to commemorate:

A Belgium, though, with sun, and mountains, and hectares of vineyards - all that cool and smooth Reisling instead of beer-brewing. But with Germanic or Belgian moments: some mildly pornographic beer bottle labels caught my eye.

I had never seen these before, the White Storks, or heard their beaks clattering after they fly in from the fields by the Rhine:

Of course, I was at times keen to stay in early modern mode, and here I am, looking (I think) quite the part:

My chief artistic find was in this superbly-housed gallery, the Augustinermuseum in Freiburg (we motored into Germany for a day). Those are the original statues from the niches on the cathedral, elongated to be seen from pavement level.

It's a Sundenfall, a Fall of Man, carved in boxwood by Meister H.L., who was active c.1511-33. The tree of knowledge is a fig tree, its distinctive leaves carved with astonishing delicacy. There's no flattening, everything is rendered in the round.

I like the choice of a fig as the forbidden fruit.

The animals of paradise are superbly done - that fine lion, and the stag, its antlers carved (how?!)

Durer's parrot sits up the tree:

Freiburg also offers a Cathedral with extraordinary stained glass, all in the most vibrant colours. Those in the nave were funded by the city's guilds, so you have a shoemakers' window, one from the tailors, the breadmakers - and amongst these windows, one that you could only imagine had been sponsored by the torturers and executioners' guild (or, as Abhorson would say, 'our mystery'). Eye-poppingly hideous deaths

I shall have to ask medievalist colleagues to identify the saint depicted below. It must be some crazy yarn from the Golden Legend. I saw the motif in a painting in the Colmar Unterlinden museum, and here again in the glass at Freiburg. As you see, the saint shoes a horse by lopping off the horse's leg, nailing on the horseshoe to the hoof, and he then must re-attach the leg without causing the animal any inconvenience or pain. The magical act of the saint reminds me of the Alpine stories of the feasts of beef at sabbats with the nachstvolk, when the bones of the animal had to be placed back in the skin, and the animal would be alive again in the morning (though never quite as strong for work).

There's a concentration of villages fleuries around here, done so intensely that the car parks have notices explaining that the funds from parking charges go to the floral display in the village you are about to visit.

I wanted wildflowers, and at the top of the ridge by the Auberge de Heucote, and at the top of the Ballon D'Alsace, we found orchids that were long 'gone over' this year back in England, but in their prime at 2,000 to 3,000 metres in July in France. The French seem to call the Butterfly orchid the Orchidee de Montagne.

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I was very mildly excited to find this solitary example of an orchid I'd never seen in the UK. It turns out to be the Small White Orchid: a suitably boring name for what must be one of the most boring of its kind:

New to me was Pilosella, or 'The Devil's Paintbrush' (now, that's a plant name for you). It's just a garden escape in this country, and classified as a noxious weed in other parts of the world where it is also spreading from gardens. But protected in its native habitat.

Nor had I ever seen a Spiked Rampion:

or really taken in the Yellow Gentians (The very bitter-tasted root used to be used in beer-making. The French, divided as ever between hypochondria and enjoyment of alcohol, still make a 'liqueur de gentiane' out of it.)

or such sheets of Bistort

The Unterlinden gallery in Colmar has the Issenheim altarpiece by Grunewald: a gallery in itself, bringing together art from the medieval period down to images that anticipate Blake. But I may post another time on that intense experience. Colmar also has this variant of Cranach's Melancholia - she aimlessly whittles at a stick, as the night-army hurtles through the sky, a mad mixture of mercenary landesknechts and witches.

Early modern text messages, painfully transmitted

The vanity of dogmatizing, or, Confidence in opinions manifested in a discourse of the shortness and uncertainty of our knowledge, and its causes: with some reflexions on peripateticism, and an apology for philosophy / by Jos. Glanvill (1661)

It’s a learned work in which our learned author displays his learning by listing all the processes and phenomena for which the learned world provides no explanation: “we are as much non-plust by the most contemptible Worm, and Plant, we tread on. How is a drop of Dew organiz'd into an Insect, or a lump of Clay into animal Perfections? How are the Glories of the Field spun, and by what Pencil are they limn'd in their unaffected bravery?” 

Such learned disquisitions on our ignorance are of course sceptical in stance. Richard Popkin, in his History of Scepticism, is kinder to Glanvill (I think) than the author of the ODNB life, taking him seriously. In his time, Glanvill was answered by Thomas White, An exclusion of scepticks from all title to dispute being an answer to The vanity of dogmatizing (1665), who rather over-anxiously sets off to warn the young wits of both universities against such a potentially debilitating scepticism: “the studious of truth may understand it alike dangerous to think every thing and nothing is demonstrated.”

In Glanville’s book, knowledge has not been lost culturally in a decline from the days of the ancients. He attacks Aristotle vigorously: “That the Heavens are void of corruption, is Aristotles supposal: But the Tube hath betray’d their impurity; and Neoterick Astronomy hath found spots in the Sun.” Knowledge, rather, has been lost from its high point in unfallen Eden. The normal human condition is, for Glanvill, to be “naturally amorous of, and impatient for Truth, and yet averse to, and almost incapacitated for, that diligent and painful search, which is necessary to its discovery.” In Glanvill’s account, Adam is a fantasy figure, a hero with superpowers of knowledge, a thought experiment about what a human being could know at an undiminished, pre-lapsarian full capacity.

The very first sentence rumbles with that particular 17^thcentury plangency: “Our misery is not of yesterday, but as antient as the first Criminal, and the ignorance we are involved in, almost coaeval with the humane nature; not that we were made so by our God, but our selves; we were his creatures, sin and misery were ours.”

But for all that relish of the gloom into which we have fallen, there’s an excited sense that there are new heroes in thought (Descartes, Gassendi, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Henry More and, ominously enough, Sir Kenelm Digby), and that new technologies can lift our perceptions up to the levels enjoyed by Adam:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew’d him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo’s tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art.”

What seems to me interesting about this is that Adam is not a static figure of perfection, but enables Glanvill to think about what super-sensory powers might exist. His Adam, we would say, is able to perceive much further along the electro-magnetic spectrum. Glanvil’s Adam, able to perceive so much more, understands invisible forces: the magnet, gravity, and (important for Glanvill) coherencies in the nature of things, connections, all the 'sympathies' he thought Kenelm Digby was helping discover: “Sympathies and Antipathies were to him no occult qualities” … “it appears to be most reasonable, that the circumference of our Protoplast’s senses, should be the same with that of nature’s activity”

So Glanvill pivots between a fantasy of the perfect knowledge of Adam in paradise, and the present, in which new ideas may restore former states of insight and understanding. Glanvill is aware of surmises about where long-hidden knowledge can be re-found: “Modern Ingenuity expects Wonders from Magnetick discoveries”.

He comes up with an intelligent list of desiderata:

"It may be some Ages hence, a voyage to the Southern unknown Tracts, yea possibly the Moon, will not be more strange then one to America. To them, that come after us, it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest Regions; as now a pair of Boots to ride a Journey. And to conferr at the distance of the Indies by Sympathetick conveyances, may be as usual to future times, as to us in a litterary correspondence. The restauration of gray hairs to Iuvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length be effected without a miracle: And the turning of the now comparatively desert world into a Paradise, may not improbably be expected from late Agriculture."

There’s the recurrent early modern fantasy of instant communication over distance, here, not by using spirits, but by “Sympathetick conveyances”. Glanvill does not at this point expound a view that Adam could have done this: that would raise too many problems of its own. A telepathic Adam could have forestalled the Fall. Instead, he tells, famously, the tale of the Scholar Gypsy, an early modern Darren Brown who exerts mental control at distance over the conversation of his old friends.

What Glanvill comes up with next is not a story for a distinguished nineteenth century poem. It’s another tale of remote connection, and details both the potential and the drawbacks to having ‘sympathized hands’ (and, as they say, ‘Don’t try this at home’):

"That some have conferr’d at distance by sympathized hands, and in a moment have thus transmitted their thoughts to each other, there are late specious relations do attest it: which say, that the hands of two friends being sympathized by a transferring of flesh from one into the other, and the place of the letters mutually agreed on; the least prick in the hand of one, the other will be sensible of, and that in the same part of his own. And thus the distant friend by a new kind of Chiromancy may read in his own hand what his correspondent had set down in his. For instance, would I in London acquaint my intimate in Paris, that I am well: I would then prick that part where I had appointed the letter [I:] and doing so in another place to signifie that word was done, proceed to [A,] thence to [M] and so on, till I had finisht what I intended to make known. Now that there have been some such practices, I have had a considerable relation, which I hold not impertinent to insert. A Gentleman comes to a Chirurgeon to have his arm cut off: The Surgeon perceiving nothing that it ailed, was much startled at the motion; thinking him either in jest, or besides himself. But by a more deliberate recollection, perceiving that he was both sober, and in earnest; entreats him to know the reason of so strange a desire, since his arm to him seem’d perfectly sound: to which the Gentleman replyes, that his hand was sympathiz’d, and his friend was dead, so that if not prevented by amputation, he said, it would rot away, as did that of his deceased Correspondent. Nor was this an unreasonable surmise; but, if there be any such way of manual Sympathizing, a very probable conjecture. For, that which was so sensibly affected with so inconsiderable a touch, in all likelyhood would be more immuted, by those greater alterations which are in Cadaverous Solutions."

One can, I think, feel reasonably certain that that never happened (which is a relief). Glanvill is eager to announce a breakthrough: these rather painful early modern text messages have been sent and received (but there was a snag). His language is interesting: “there are late specious relations do attest it”. Now, the OED actually cites this very work for the first use of ‘specious’ in its current sense: that is, sense ‘d. Of falsehood, bad qualities, etc.’

1661   J. Glanvill Vanity of Dogmatizing, xii. 108  “Such an Infinite of uncertain opinions, bare probabilities, specious falshoods.”

Yet here, the batty anecdote he retails is a ‘specious relation’ with ‘specious’ in older senses: pleasing, plausible. Glanvill also uses ‘speciousness’ in this work: “Self-designers are seldom disappointed, for want of the speciousness of a cause to warrrant them” – what he means here is that we always find reasons plausible to us to support our preconceptions. We are supposed to deduce which precise meaning of a word is intended from the context in which a word is used by an author, but Glanvill’s ‘specious relation’ seems to me to say ‘specious falshood’ even before the anecdote is produced, the sceptic in Glanvill discounting the newly uncovered way to use 'sympathies' even before he's told us about it. 

Images from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vanitas 

'With the sudors of thy industry shalt thou spend thy days'. Loredano's 'Life of Adam', 1659.

Writing purported or speculative biographies of Adam had gone on since pre-Christian times. The Vita Adae et Evae, as Brian Murdoch in his edition (with J.A. Tasioulas) of The Apocryphal Loves of Adam and Eve (two early middle English poems) explains has no originatory text, but was a set of related narratives with common elements, the ‘Adambooks’, recorded all over Pre-Reformation Europe, into the Balkans, the Middle East, and Christian parts of Africa.

The early and medieval narratives tended to focus on penance. After the Fall, Adam and Eve attempt penance for Original Sin: they fast, and stand in rivers for days at a time. Eve is again deceived by the serpent, who truncates and ruins her penance by disguising himself this time as an angel, and falsely telling her that the penance she has done is sufficient. Adam, more successful in continuing penitent, does win a kind of remission – they will die and go to hell, but be saved from hell after 5,600 years. The ‘Adambooks’ tend to continue with the adventures of Seth, sent by the dying Adam to follow back along the footprints they left when driven from Eden – for no grass has grown in these prints. If Seth follows them back to Paradise, he is to ask for the oil of mercy. Depending on the telling, Seth sometimes meets the serpent on the way, and is wounded in the face. He reaches Paradise, but is debarred entry. But the Cherubim guarding Paradise gives him seeds, or a branch of fruit. Seth hurries back, but his father has died in the meantime. The seeds, or the fruit, will be buried with Adam, and grow into the tree that will provide wood for the cross, for these stories connect to a set of legends about the Holy Cross.

I’ve been reading a late example and atypical, by Gian Francesco Loredan, published in Venice in 1640, and appearing in England, translated by ‘J.S.’ in 1659. This 17^th century ‘Adambook’ omits the theme of penance: indeed, it is so anti-Eve that Adam barely seems to have anything to be penitent for.

Loredan was widely translated into English, with five different works appearing between 1654 and 1682. As for The life of Adam, it’s hard to define what the original appeal was: was it, beneath its ostensible subject, actually enjoyed as a wittily anti-feminist work using that age-old target, Eve? Maybe in a work like this we get some sense of how many pictures of Adam and Eve (or some of the manifold other depictions of them) were received, in a mixture of salacity and moralization. If you think of Loredan himself as accustomed to seeing the two Tintoretto paintings of the Fall of Man in Venice (in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and that in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, above), well, they are both Eve-centered versions. Adam has his back to us in both paintings, provoking us to our own incriminating reaction to the temptation offered by Eve.

Loredan was born into a minor branch of the Venetian clan who provided three Doges. He was founder of the Accademia degli Incogniti, noblemen who were in their way free-thinkers (and promoters of opera). Loredan’s writings emerge from that group: novellas, collections of witty essays, a romance, and a ‘scala sancta’, an ascent of the soul based on fifteen psalms.

The tone of ‘The Life of Adam’ - at least in English - is of bland moralization, as God’s intentions behind each detail of that scanty narrative in Genesis are speculated upon in a series of ‘because’ / ‘or else…’ extrapolations. Like the medieval example, the work is utterly anti-feminist, an aspect it has in common with other parts of Loredan’s writings. His view of women seems to compound an exaggerated sense of the persuasive power of female beauty with an extreme view of female moral frailty - nothing very novel about that, of course. He was himself forced into marriage (apparently).

‘The Life of Adam’ deals with Adam’s fall after some general scene-setting which seems to have been derived as much from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as from the Bible: “God had, with Ideas suitable to his own omnipotence, compiled the machine of Heaven and of the World. The Chaos retained no longer either confusion, or darkness. The Elements, though proud of their variety of qualities, united themselves for the conservation of the Whole …”

After a speech of suitable gratitude for having been created, Adam names the animals: “His Divine Majesty made all Birds and other Animals of the earth to come before Adam, that from him (who had received from God the knowledge of their Natures) they should receive their Names. The Lord did this, to make Adam see by comparison how much he was obliged, in seeing himself so different, and so upright above all other Creatures. Or, because God having created Man Prince of all creatures, would have him know his vassalls and the Animals reverence him as their Prince…” Again, the detail about the distinct human erectness among the animal creation is Ovidian, though it was a common enough observation about humankind. (Obviously, there are lots of animals you have to ignore: plenty of flightless birds are upright in stance.) Milton makes much of it.

But we progress rapidly to the nemesis of this grateful and knowledgeable Adam, his wife. Loredan has a speculation about why Adam was made to fall asleep prior to the removal of his rib: Adam had after all been granted a prophetic spirit by God, and so, if he had been awake, he might well have objected:

“Or else it might be, that he cast Adam into a sleep, as if he feared that he would contradict him; whilst with the spirit of prophesy given him, he might foresee the mischiefs accruing to mankind in the making of Eve.”

Loredan wonders why God, wanting his new world populated, didn’t create multiple humans. As answers to his own idle question, he produces both a democratic and an anti-feminist speculation: “God for the more expeditious population of the World, could have made many men, & many Women, but would, that all should descend from one Father, and one Mother, to the end Men should conserve Love, peace, and concord amongst themselves. And who knows … he would not permit Adam multiplicity of Wives for that he might not thereby multiply his miseries…”

Eve once created, and Adam revived (with his opportunity for prophetic objection missed), Loredan now turns to the dangerous and total allure of women, which he expresses in Petrarchan or Marinist cliches: “Adam stood stupefied in contemplating two Suns under one pair of eyebrows, whilst he saw no more but one in Heaven … The by-Nature-plaited tresses, so nearly resembled Gold in tincture, and purity, that they pleaded Adams excuse, if he did not refuse so honourable a prison … Her flesh appearing like a lovely composure of scarlet and milk, although at the touch it would be taken for marble. Her age was about the fourth lustre, (accompting five years to a Lustre) proper for a woman in reference to Procreation and Love.”

Adam nearly idolizes her: “Adam was about to have adored her as a Goddess. For but only that it was infused into him by revelation, that the woman was a part of himself, doubtless disobedience should not have been the first of his sins.”

Once acquainted, Adam duly informs Eve about the one prohibition under which they are to live. Eve immediately sets off, on her own, in quest to see the forbidden fruit. The novelisation of Genesis treats this as yet unfallen Eve as though all post-lapsarian accusations of women apply to her: “The Woman became at those prohibitions the more curious. To forbid a woman, is to increase her appetite … The Woman therefore, transported by those impatiencies, that interposed between them and their felicity, left Adam; desiring to enjoy … the sight of that fruit, which being forbidden, was to be supposed the more exquisite.”

In a particularly breathtaking piece of misogyny, Loredan manages to imply that Eve provokes her own temptation: “Having found the tree, she beheld the fruits with so much curiosity, that it induced the Devil to tempt her.”

The serpent itself is in the shape of that familiar monster, the serpentine female: “Amongst the infinite forms of animals there was a Serpent with the face of a Damsel, which God had replenished with all subtility.” I think this notion goes all the way back to the Venerable Bede. It set off, no doubt, in a mixture of anti-feminism and crack-brained rationalization: for it provides an answer of sorts to questions about why Eve wasn’t alarmed by a serpent that spoke to her: the serpent-tempter had in part assumed her shape. As Loredan puts it: “She started not at the sight of a Serpent; for seeing it resemble her self in countenance she rather rejoiced then feared”. It seems nobody dared to suggest either to the Venerable Bede, or any of those who repeated him, that this half-human serpent would in fact be a far more alarming sight.

The serpent-maiden flatters Eve. Eve repeats the terms of the prohibition, and Loredan does not fail to score a point against women by exploiting the disparity between Genesis 2, 17 and Genesis 3,3: “His Divine Majesty had commanded only that they should not eat of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil; but the Woman moreover adds the Touching it: because as a Woman she could not discourse without aggravating or over-reaching.”

The narrative briefly pauses to suggest the more perceptive things Eve might have said to refute her tempter (“How came I to merit so much of thy affection that thou shouldst desire, that I should first obtain a benefit so great, a prerogative so rare, as to be divine?”) before noting her precipitate belief: “The unfortunate woman believed all for truth, because she desired all to be true.”

When Eve eats the fruit, Loredan introduces another piece of anti-woman needling, now taking offence that “She called not Adam to eat of the Apple before her, as was the duty of her subjection; because believing divinity to be reposed in that fruit, she would not admit any to have the precedence of her.”

When Eve, having failed in her duty to give the fruit first to her husband, eventually gets back to Adam with her story, Loredan gives Adam a firmly reasoned refusal to join her in disobedience:

“Content your self with having your self alone transgressed the commands of God’s law. Desire not company in evil. Lead not others into your precipices. I am your companion, I am your Lover; but will know how to be your Enemy.”

But Eve resorts (what else?) to “sighs and tears, the wonted artifices with which women betray the honour, liberty, and safety of men”, and to allurement: “Casting therefore her arms about the neck of Adam, she so besieged his constancy, with her glances, caresses, and kisses that, after some small resistance, he yielded himself overcome …What cannot women do in an amorous soul!”

As soon as Adam has a morsel of the fruit going down his throat, he repents, and he sees their nakedness. Loredan makes a firmly Augustinian point about how, previously, “lust had not ability to suscitate sensual affects, without the consent of Man”. Adam now knows his, and his wife’s, nakedness, and doesn’t like the effect it has.

God appears in the Garden, and finds Adam, in his fig-leaves, hiding with all the self-exculpatory wiles of, say, Captain Francesco Schettino, beneath the forbidden tree itself. Adam stoutly blames God for making Eve too alluring: “Who can resist the power of beauty? The commands of her, that thou gavest me for a Companion, hath in such manner tyrannized over my reason, and intellectuals, that I have not power to dispose of my self … He that can withstand the importunate solicitude of the fairest piece that ever came out of thy hands, either knows not how to Love or deserves not to be Beloved. Alone I should not have known sin, for bad-company is a fomenter of the greatest sins. Lord, turn against her thy reproofs and chastisements.”

Eve perhaps makes a rather better job of self-exculpation “I could not persuade my self that there were treacheries in Paradise, nor deceits in the face of a Damsel. Thunder therefore, O Lord, thy punishments upon the Serpent, as upon the author of all evil.”

God passes his curses on the serpent, the earth, Eve and Adam (“With the sudors of thy industry shalt thou spend thy days”), and expels them, addressing Adam in particular: “Get thee packing therefore out of the Paradise of delights, and fix thine abode where thou wast formed, cultivating that earth from whence thou hast derived thy being.”

Loredan asserts that the expulsion counts as one of God’s acts of mercy: “It was one of the wonted effects of God’s benignity to drive Adam out of Paradise, because, if he had continued amongst those delights without enjoying them, he would have received too much torment; there being no greater punishment to be found then to be in the midst of felicities and to be denied the fruition.”

He then proceeds to sum up. There’s the usual notion that Adam and Eve were only in Paradise for a few hours: “Poor Adam! that didst not scarce one whole day enjoy the gifts of Gods favour. His felicity being shorter then that of an Ephemeris [a mayfly]. About three of clock he was brought into the Garden; at six a clock, he sinned; and in the Evening, was expulsed.”

Once outside Eden, Eve is given a speech of thorough contrition, which is undermined by Adam turning lustful: “ ‘The sorrow for my sin shall die with my heart, which I believe shall be the last part of me alive’ … Adam, with a smile begot by the stimulations of sensuality, thus replied, ‘I need no longer now to fear your company (my Eve) since you become to me an incentive to good’ …Thus saying & with glances, and kisses having thrown his arms about his wife’s neck they gave themselves wholly up to delight, which peradventure for the time begot in them an oblivion of all the accidents past.”

Loredan then spells out the underlying belief, the prejudice that constrained the duration of man’s unfallen state to less than a day. You had to get them out of Paradise before they can have sex, and beget any offspring without the taint of original sin: “Till this instant Adam had been kept a Virgin, to intimate unto us that Matrimony fills the earth, but Virginity Paradise.”

After sex, Eve has an instant awareness that she is pregnant: “Scarce had Eve satisfied the instinct of nature, and appeased in part the allurements of sense, when with the signs of pregnancy, she was assaulted by repentance, the indivisible companion of fleshly delights.”

Loredan lobs in another of his quite appalling misogynistic observations. The pregnancy proves to be a difficult one: “Here I will not mention the extremes of her passions, in loathing, and longing for every thing; in the burden of her belly, in her vigils, and in the acerbity of those pangs, the more grievous, by how much the more strange: because the most that I can speak, would be the least part of what they were. Much less will I speak of the sufferance of Adam; because it is known that to have a wife, and a wife pregnant, is a species of martyrdom.”

Poor Eve gives birth to a boy and a girl. In these quotations, I suppose the daughters’ names are derived from Rabbinical lore: “Eve brought forth two births, Cain was the name of the male, and Calamana that of the female … Eve afterwards bore Abel, and Delbora, whereby she increased the joy of Adam.”

Meanwhile, Adam emerges as well worth a place on the radio show ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’: “Adam, not content with what the Earth repaid him with interest for the seed received, employed himself also in continual grafting. He transplants wild trees into the meliorated, makes the sterile fructiferous, and dulcorates the insipid … He transmutes one species into another, and inoculates many species upon one sole stock.” And he progresses from living in caves to mud huts: “Poor Adam sheltered himself (necessity constraining him) in certain Caverns, the palaces of Nature … He learnt, for his greater shame [his] first Architecture from the Swallow.”

After Cain slays Abel, Adam vows to give up being fruitful and multiplying, but God releases him from his vow, and so Seth is born, from whom Christ will descend.

Adam finally dies aged 930, and we get a specific day for his death: “It is the opinion of many that he dyed on Friday the 3^d of March, being the day on which he was created, to hint that misery comes in the very instant of our felicity.” We also are told where he was buried, and subsequently re-buried: “He was buried in Hebron, in a Sepulcher of Marble, and was afterwards transported to Calvary, to the very place where Christ died.”

Of Eve’s death, Loredan makes the following typically hostile remarks: “Of Eve’s age the Scriptures make no mention; perhaps because we ought not to know the death of her, that deserved to die before she was born; all the miseries of mankind taking rise from her. It’s probable that she was oppressed by age, and passion, for Adam’s death. It pleased his Divine Majesty, perhaps, that she should survive Adam to double her punishment, in beholding the death of the dearest part of herself.”

This suavely nasty work was, as I say, translated into English, and dedicated to the ‘Lady S.B.’, the translator affirming that the first of men made a suitable subject for the ‘best of women’. I suppose one should never be surprised at the crassness of 17^th century men, and their view of what women might want to read.