Most readers of the Idylls of the King wonder how the traditionally virile and manly King Arthur of legend and romance evolved into the restrained, almost maidenly Victorian monarch of Alfred Lord Tennyson's most ambitious work. Many of the earliest readers of the Idylls saw the change as disquieting evidence of the growing domestication and even feminization of the age, and later critics, however they may have moderated the emotionalism of that first response, still see in Arthur's striking metamorphosis a key element in any analysis of the poem. I argue that such a metamorphosis was inevitable, given the nineteenthcentury confluence of what Foucault calls “the history of sexuality” with what we may call the history of history, and that Tennyson's Arthurian retelling, far from being weakened by its revolutionary premise, is stronger and more resonant for depicting its hero as a species of female king.

The quarrel between Adam and Eve in book 9 concerns not only relations between the sexes but also the nature of human government. Prelapsarian Adam and Eve, who, like the antinomian Christian, possess total spiritual liberty, deal with an epistemological dilemma that confronted antinomians like Milton during the English revolution: In the absence of intrinsically authoritative external laws, how can one know when one's decision to act is based on the direction of God's spirit dwelling in one's heart and when it is based on personal desire? In the light of Milton's historical answer to this question, we can see that Milton dramatizes in Eve the voluntarist antinomian's tendency to overconfidence and in Adam the humanist antinomian's struggle with right reason. While neither person sins in this scene, both lose their balance in particularly antinomian ways that grant us insight into the necessarily precarious nature of human freedom.

Throughout his life, Jefferson maintained an active but intermittent interest in the study of Old English. He collected a sizable library in the subject and advocated the utility of Old English to the professions, especially law. His major work, the Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language, proposed radical simplifications in pedagogy and instituted at the University of Virginia the first college course of Old English ever taught in America. In several important ways Jefferson accurately predicted the future of Old English studies, and he rightly criticized the Latinate bias of contemporary grammars. Nevertheless, his ignorance of Germanic philology undermined many of his ideas on the grammar and phonology of Old English.