Edward II and his comparatively short yet remarkably dramatic reign from July 1307 to January 1327 have long exerted a fascination. In particular, the nature of the king's sexuality and his relationships with the men often called his “favorites” and his alleged murder by anal penetration with a red-hot poker or spit, which has often been interpreted as a punishment for Edward's having sex with men, have engaged writers down the centuries.

In a 2006 essay “The Sexualities of Edward II,” Mark Ormrod stated that it is impossible to know for sure what emotional and physical contact Edward had with men and women, and that of necessity, later writers deal not with Edward's actions and his beliefs about his own sexuality, but with his reputation: what people thought and said about him and his personality, and the place of his sexuality within that [W. M. Ormrod, “The Sexualities of Edward II,” in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson [2006], 22–47, at 22)]. Kit Heyam agrees that “a more fruitful question” to ask is whether the people of late medieval and early modern England believed that Edward had sex with his male favorites rather than if he did, an issue incapable of proof one way or the other. Using chronicle accounts, poetry, drama, and political pamphlets, in The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697: A Literary Transformation of History Heyam traces the development of narratives about Edward's transgressive sexuality from the early 1300s to the late 1600s and how the king, his relationships with his male favorites, his forced abdication in early 1327, and his reported murder later that year were used as political exempla in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

The book contains seven themed and interdisciplinary chapters in addition to the introduction, conclusion, and index, and a bibliography is included at the end of each chapter. Heyam has carefully compiled an appendix consisting of a list of the sources from 1305 until 1697 that discuss Edward's reign and his sexuality and the manner of his death in particular; the date of composition and the author, where known; which earlier sources the author used, if any; and which later writers, if any, used the text as a source. This will surely be of great value to future researchers. Heyam's translations of relevant extracts from medieval chronicles composed in Latin, and discussions of the meaning of particular words, such as the essential but usually unacknowledged difference between the “vice of sodomy” (vitio sodomiae) and “sodomitical vice” (vitio sodomitico) also make an important and useful contribution to determining what fourteenth-century writers really said about Edward's sexuality.

The chronicles composed during Edward's reign or in the decades afterwards receive, however, a somewhat cursory treatment in comparison to the works of later writers, though Heyam does expand on a novel observation that some fourteenth-century chroniclers prioritized their readers’ engagement and therefore attempted to write compellingly emotional accounts of Edward's life and death intended to appeal to their audience rather than merely reciting the sober facts. Heyam is on solid ground when discussing how Edward II was used as a cautionary exemplum for current important issues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the favoritism toward certain men displayed by Elizabeth I, her successor James VI and I, and James's son and successor Charles I, and the Jacobean Exclusion Crisis. The influence of Christopher Marlowe's c. 1592 play about Edward II, especially in the way it was the first text to present Edward's relationship with Piers Gaveston as explicitly sexual and romantic, is presented in painstaking detail, and in a particularly insightful section, Heyam draws parallels between Marlowe's near-contemporary Henri III of France (r. 1574–89) and his mignons and Marlowe's depiction of Edward and his “minions” (51–59).

The final chapter details the development of the narrative of Edward's alleged murder in 1327 by having a red-hot spit thrust inside him, with particular reference to the influential accounts composed around the middle of the fourteenth century by Geoffrey le Baker and the author of the Anglo-Norman Long Version of the Brut. The numerous accounts in other contemporary texts that attribute Edward's death to suffocation, strangulation, grief, illness, a fall, poison, natural causes, and so on, are mentioned only in passing, while the possibility of Edward's survival past September 1327, despite the existence of a letter from the archbishop of York to the mayor of London stating that Edward was alive and in good health in January 1330, is dismissed as unconvincing in a single sentence. Errors throughout appear very few: there is no “consensus” that Hugh Despenser the Younger received the earldom of Gloucester in the 1320s, as he did not (156); Edward was crowned on 25 February 1308 (12); the count of Hainault in 1326 was William, not John (13); and the Vita Edwardi Secundi did not and could not give Edward's queen, Isabella, a speech in which she accused Gaveston of coming between herself and her husband (302), as the speech was made more than thirteen years after Gaveston's death. The two Hugh Despensers, father and son, are insufficiently differentiated and are discussed as though they formed a single entity and acted as Edward's favorites in the same ways, though this is perhaps a result of later writers failing to make much of a distinction between the men and their very different personalities and career arcs. Heyam's focus appears unbalanced; Piers Gaveston is discussed far more frequently and in far greater depth than Despenser the Younger even though the latter's behavior as royal favorite played a hugely important role in bringing down the king in 1326–27, while Edward's prominent and influential male favorites of 1315 to 1318–19, Roger Damory, Hugh Audley, and William Montacute, are not mentioned at all. These points do not detract from the value of a thorough and ambitious study that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the development of Edward II's reputation over the centuries, the evolution of vocabulary used to discuss sexual transgression, and the writing of medieval history in early modern England.