ABSTRACT
By now, it is unsurprising to observe that Middle English works that deal with the Fall tend to supply elaborations that refl ect poorly on Eve. For example, the Prologue to a fourteenth-century version of the biblical Epistles includes a close translation of Genesis 2-3. Despite its usual fi delity to the Vulgate, it cannot help but add that woman was ‘more frele, more unkunnynge þan was man’.1 These extra titbits are characteristic of the genre as can be seen in the following synthesis of several medieval English accounts of the Fall.
