Let me be clear from the outset: this study does not set out to cast Edward II as a medieval representative of any one modern category of sexual orientation, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, whatever. The efforts made in the last few generations of scholarship to ‘identify’ this king in such a manner are, in the end, both anachronistic and futile: anachronistic because medieval attitudes to sexuality were so different from our own, and futile because the nature of the evidence makes it impossible to tell what Edward actually did – let alone what he thought himself to be doing – whether and when he engaged in emotional and physical contact with women or men. Rather, we are dealing here, of necessity, with reputations: with what people thought and said about Edward II's personality, and the place of his sexuality within it, during his lifetime and in the generation after his demise. In some respects, this approach is well established: the idea of a distinction – and tension – between Edward's private life and his public reputation has been a stock-in-trade of historical writing since the Renaissance. Postmodernism, however, has taught us to treat such reputations not as deviations from some scientific truth about the past but as historical phenomena that existed, and exist, in their own right. This article therefore attempts to move beyond the somewhat naïve and sterile positivist debate that aims to claim Edward either as gay or as straight, and instead to examine the reasons why some people in the fourteenth century found it appropriate and necessary to include issues about sexuality in their construction of this king's character and reign.