When the Archangel Michael in Paradise Lost foresees the church attacked from without by persecution and from within by 'specious forms' so that 'truth shall retire / Bestuck with slanderous darts' (12.534-6), he summons along with the figure of Truth a picture of St Sebastian stuck full of arrows: who, however, did not die of those wounds but had to be executed repeatedly. Milton's epic is similarly susceptible to recurrent volleys; and his figure of Woman brought to life in Eve has been a primary target, with similar resurgent vitality.

Thirty years ago, a largely 'masculinist' critical consensus thought that Milton conformed to a traditional reading of the biblical Eve as inherently trivial, vain, and inclined to fall, thus denying Milton's assertion of eternal providence. Since then much work has been done - by Joan Bennett, Francis Blessington, Barbara Lewalski, Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Stella Revard, James Turner, Irene Samuel, Kathleen Swaim, Joan Webber, and Joseph Wittreich, to name a few - showing how Milton shatters this stereotype. More recently in the vanguard of attack have been feminists offended by Milton's partial acceptance of Pauline tradition concerning the subordination of wives and the misogynous diatribes he allows some of his dramatis personae. 'Resistant' readers writing from the point of view of gender - for example, Jackie DiSalvo, Sandra Gilbert, Christine Froula, Marcia Landy, Mary Nyquist, Patricia Parker, and Maureen Quilligan (178), some of whom admire Milton in other ways - challenge what Nyquist calls 'Western bourgeois or liberal feminism'; Nyquist interrogates the 'historically determined and class-inflected discourse of “equal rights” ' (99), shows that Milton's contemporaries of both sexes offered less genderspecific interpretations of Genesis, and finds that Milton's contractual interpretation of God's provision of meet help, contrasted with Rachel Speght's view of Adam as a 'passive recipient' of divine grace, serves 'an individualism paradigmatically masculine' (114-15).