Elizabeth Cary is of interest to scholars of hagiography primarily because she is the subject of The Lady Falkland Her Life, a mid‐seventeenth‐century spiritual biography by her daughters that this essay argues is modeled structurally on the medieval virgin martyr passiones. Its authors appropriate this structure not only to call attention to their mother's piety but to emphasize Cary's participation in literary culture as a Catholic reader and writer. The attention given to Cary's involvement with textual culture also represents a confluence between the values of the Reformation and those of the Benedictine convent at Cambrai, where the text was produced. The use of a medieval form thus works to legitimate the piety of an English Catholic woman writer and to establish the relevance of a Catholic convent in post‐Reformation Europe.
Eve's request to work apart from Adam and the ensuing discussion in Book 9 of Paradise Lost have received a great deal of scholarly attention with regard to Milton's emphasis on Eve's free will and the similarity of Eve's arguments to those of Areopagitica. 1 There has been considerably less focus on the impact that Adam's and Eve's differing concepts of solitude have on the dynamics of the scene. This is rather surprising, as the ostensible topic of the discussion is whether to work together or separately; how Eve and Adam conceptualize the potential (however temporary) condition of solitude would seem to be important. 2 I suggest, then, that before we can fully understand the tense conversation between them about Eve's desire to work alone (9.204-403), we must acknowledge the differences in their perceptions of what solitude is. This essay provides a reading both of that conversation and of Milton's explicit decision to position Eve alone for the temptation scene, with respect to both popular seventeenth-century notions of solitude and Milton's previous developments of the concept in his work.
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