John Milton produced the most magnificent poetic account ever written of the biblical Fall of man in Paradise Lost (1667). William Poole presents a comprehensive analysis of the origin, evolution, and contemporary debate on the Fall, and the way seventeenth-century authors, particularly Milton, represented it. Poole first examines the range and depth of early modern thought on the subject, then explains and evaluates the basis of the idea and the intellectual and theological controversies it inspired from early Christian times to Milton's own century.