These chapters were originally given as the Hulsean lectures for 1997–8 in the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge under the slightly differently angled, but also appropriate, title Adam sub gratia; although they have now been expanded somewhat and provided with notes, an attempt has been made to preserve at least some of the informality of the lecture format. The theme is Adam: Adam is presented – in the terms of the Hulse bequest – in the light of Christianity, although not necessarily in what is usually seen as theological writing in the narrower sense. The interplay of theology and literature, and its use to put across to a largely lay audience centrally important theological ideas, is of special significance in the Middle Ages, and also (though there are changes in attitude) in the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This applies in particular to the divine economy of Fall and Redemption, the universality of original sin, and the identity of mankind with their first parents. The aim of the lectures was to look precisely at the interaction of literature and theology, and at the presentation, use and lay reception of these central ideas in medieval and later European literature, using as wide a range of genres and vernaculars as possible.

The process begins with the expansion of Genesis within the Christian tradition of apocryphal Adam-lives and the Holy Rood stories, at the interface between canonicity and literature, with the partial secularisation of a religious story.