Last edited in 1978, the two poems edited in this volume are medieval English versions of the legendary lives of Adam and Eve, telling of their attempts to regain the Paradise they had just lost and their life after the Fall, and merging with the related legends of the history of the Cross after Christ. The poems are important as part of a very large European tradition of vernacular adaptations of the Adambook, known in its Latin form (the immediate source) as the Vitae Adae et Evae, with analogues in many other languages. Once very well known, these stories largely disappeared after the Reformation. The works are of equal interest not only in the general area of medieval English literature, but also in the study of Old Testament apocrypha itself.