The advantage of English historicism is that it allows contemporary events and preoccupations to be observed in the context of a transcendent past; so the reader of Idylls of the King may draw conclusions about Victorian attitudes to women and nineteenth-century science. Medievalism did not preclude modernity, but actively encouraged it, with the unspoken assumption that “the Victorian world may profit from the patterns of the past.” Thus Hallam Tennyson noted of his father’s Arthurian poems that he “infused into them a spirit of modern thought and an ethical significance” which revived an entire literary tradition.