So speaks Eve to her many children from the lonely heights of her deathbed. According to an apocryphal tradition which records the post-Edenic life of Adam, Eve and their offspring, on Adam's death and prior to her own demise Eve instructs her son, Seth, to set down their lives in tablets of clay and stone in order to make permanent for posterity their transgression and suffering. Although he knows no writing, following his mother's death Seth's hand is guided by God as he writes the lives of the first mother and father into clay and stone, becoming essentially the first scribe.

Within orthodox Judaeo-Christian tradition, of course, this inauguration of writing was regarded as a patrilineal inheritance, with figures such as Moses, Enoch, or sometimes even Adam himself as the originator of the written script. Within the alternative tradition, however, to be found in the apocryphal Adam Books, Eve herself is quite explicitly depicted as the originator of writing, in keeping with the written word's later association with the fleshly, seductive nature of women. The Latin version of this legend, known as the Vita, seems to have enjoyed widespread influence and popularity throughout the Middle Ages, as evidenced in a number of popular texts, ranging from the Townely and Chester Cycle plays to the continenental Genesis B, and later even re-emerging in the early modern period in Milton's epic, Paradise Lost.