Milton scholarship of last fifteen years has shown a persistent attention to question of sexuality in Paradise Lost. Even among scholars who hold self-consciously opposed positions such as those of so-called feminist and opposition camps of Milton criticism, there is a general consensus that sees Adam and Eve's marital relations as temperate, sexuality.' Within this consensus there are critics who are primarily concerned with what they identify as licit marital sex, and those that focus on illicit sex. The latter is usually defined as sexual expression that lies beyond prelapsarian edenic marriage, and criticism of this kind has tended to concentrate on pointedly incestuous union of Satan and his daughter, Sin. The Satan-Sin incest is commonly seen as a deliberately shocking parody of other socio-familial relations in poem that serve, by their propriety, to define right relations between man and woman within poem's broader framework of proper relations established by God. Edward Le Comte, who associates incest with Death's kingdom of Hell, for example, argues that the love of angels, unfallen marriage of Adam and Eve . . . have their distorted reflection, their perversion in hell, so that Satan-Sin union is explained as one of author's 'contraries.' In a similar vein, Jean Hagstrum's study of love identifies Satan and Sin with eroticism, and Adam and Eve with an ideal heterosexual marital state. Hagstrum suggests that eroticism throws ideal into relief to establish reciprocity as a model for appropriate human socio-familial, and particularly marital, relations.2 In conceiving of one set of relations as a distortion or parody of another, Le Comte and Hagstrum imply that converse of these relations is already in place in ideal of Adam and Eve's marriage and reciprocal marital sexuality. However, neither Le Comte nor Hagstrum accounts for fact that Satan-Sin incest, recounted by Sin in book 2, actually occurs before Satan is ejected from heaven, and before creation and physical union of Adam and Eve.