What do you think you know about Edward II? This unfortunate English King is mainly remembered today for his relationships with his male favourites, celebrated or censured for their queer potential; and for his supposed murder with a red-hot poker, assumed by many to have been real or imagined retribution for his sexual behaviour. This modern reputation strikingly preserves the salient facts about Edward as highlighted by the writers of medieval and early modern England. During the four centuries after Edward's death in 1327, a historiographical consensus developed that Edward's relationships with his male favourites, particularly Piers Gaveston and the younger Hugh Despenser, were sexual and romantic; and that he was murdered by anal penetration with a red-hot spit. Despite the numerous other notable aspects of Edward's narrative in medieval and early modern accounts – not least his disastrous military efforts against Scotland – it was these details which persisted in even the shortest early accounts of his reign; and it is these aspects of his reputation, moreover, which have attracted a disproportionate amount of scrutiny from literary critics and historians alike. This book is the first attempt to trace, and to account for, the process by which this reputation developed in medieval and early modern England.

The case of Edward II's reputation has important implications beyond its immediate relevance to scholars of his reign and afterlife.