Show Notes
One cannot really understand how stories have shaped women’s lives without taking on the story of Eve in Genesis.
This episode is the start of our All About Eve season, and this one is close to our hearts: we’ve wanted to explore the Eve story since the genesis of the pod.
Our special guest is medieval scholar, Dr. Jana Byars, and she helps us answer some important questions. What is the original story? How does Eve handle the serpent’s offer? Why is Eve blamed for tempting Adam when he just pops the fruit in his mouth, no questions asked?
And who adds to the story? Jana tells us about three rather vocal and opinionated men of the Early Church: Paul, Tertullian, and Augustine. How much of their own personalities and life experiences enter into how they revise the Eve story?
No matter what your take is on the Bible, the Genesis story of Eve has affected your life. This episode helps us see how the stories men have--quite literally--invented about the OG story have affected our lives, too.
FURTHER EXPLORATION: Jana Byars hosts the New Books Network Podcast, and if you click here you can find out more about her and her work on the pod. You can also follow Jana @janalena.bluesky.social
If you have a New Yorker subscription, you can read the article Jana mentions by Stephen Greenblatt from 2017: "How St. Augustine Invented Sex" A quote from the article: “He rescued Adam and Eve from obscurity, devised the doctrine of original sin—and the rest is sexual history.”
Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarcy from 1987 gets mentioned by Sonja, and wow is it worth reading if you want to get an overview.
“The virgin book,” Sonja references is one we did an episode on to begin our “Fallen Women” season, S5E1: Like a Virgin. Here is a link to the book: Virgin: The Untouched History (2007) by Hanne Blank. It’s deeply researched, highly readable, and–as you can tell from the title–has a sense of humor.
For more on the Eve story as metaphor for a shift over to agrarian civilization, Eve's Seed (2000) by Robert McElvaine is a fascinating read.
This season, there will be an episode all about John Milton’s sexy take on the Eve story, so that will fill in the gap of John Milton in this episode…believe us, PARADISE LOST and Milton’s WILD version of the Eve story deserves its own episode!
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