A gust for paradise

by Diane Kelsey McColley

This beautifully illustrated multidisciplinary study addresses interpretations of the Genesis creation story in Paradise Lost and other seventeenth-century English poems and in the visual arts from the Middle Ages through the Reformation. It considers poems, visual images, and music concerned with divine and human creativity and interprets these works as salutary examples for the creation of the arts and the preservation of the earth. The central topic is the "daily work of body or mind" of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost as primal artists and caretakers of nature before the Fall, developing the arts of language, music, liturgy, and government, discovering the rudiments of a technology harmless to the biosphere, and dressing and keeping a garden that is an epitome of the whole earth. These unfallen arts promote awareness of the complex harmonies of creation and potentially of civilization: an awareness that is not only linear or binary but radiant and multiple; not only monodic but also