Creating Adam and Eve: Body, soul, and gender in sixteenth-century Germany

My dissertation, “Creating Adam and Eve: Body, Soul, and Gender in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” explores the meanings of the story of Adam and Eve in the popular print culture of sixteenth-century Germany. I focus particularly on vernacular texts because I am interested in the meanings and resonances of this story for a broad lay audience, literate in German but not in Latin. This audience encountered the biblical account of the creation and fall of the first human beings in a wide variety of vernacular printed material, as the story was retold, embellished, analyzed and alluded to time and time again. The story appeared in religious texts, such as Bibles, sermons, biblical exegesis, devotional tracts, plays and broadsides. It also figured prominently in texts on medicine and natural history, such as herbals, household medical guides, anatomical treatises and books on the “secrets of nature.” In religious texts the story served as a basis for reflections on the relationship between human beings and God, on temptation, sin and free will, as well as the justification for prescriptive pronouncements on gender roles and relations. In books on medicine and natural history, the story framed descriptions of the human body and structured understandings of health and disease, sexuality and the differences between men and women. By juxtaposing representations of Adam and Eve in religious texts with those in medical and “scientific” texts, I examine the connections between body, gender and religion in sixteenth-century Germany. I argue that the story of Adam and Eve provided early modern Germans with a vehicle for defining and articulating the relationship between physical existence and spiritual life. The Genesis narrative helped sixteenth-century people to make sense of the connections between human beings and God, between body and soul, and between earthly and eternal life.