Edward II and a Literature of Same-Sex Love: The Gay King in Fiction, 1590–1640
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michael G. Cornelius's Edward II and a Literature of Same-Sex Love: The Gay King in Fiction, 1590-1640 is a thorough and convincing book, establishing the role of Edward II as a central figure in the evolution of gay characterization in English literature.Cornelius covers a chunk of time linked to what Stephen Greenblatt has called Renaissance self-fashioning, charting the extensive changes to the record of the historical king.The representations of Edward II are complex, and Cornelius considers the thick web linking the sexuality of the king and Renaissance attitudes toward culture, desire, nature, and disease.Cornelius's "Introduction" interrogates the notion of sexuality in the Middle Ages as it is linked to that of the Renaissance.Arguing that manifestations of sexuality are both biological and cultural, Cornelius examines how same-sex love was represented during the medieval period, as well as how same-sex love could intersect with the dynamics of same-sex friendship.The literature on Edward II proves a fruitful and concentrated body of work to examine samesex desire and its competing discourses.As Cornelius establishes, identifying oneself as queer is fraught in a time period that does not have those clear identifying markers.Yet, Edward II resolves some of these issues because of the very public enactment of his relationship with Piers Galveston.Thus, Edward II is a catalyst for examining the prevailing moods around same-sex desire.Cornelius provides a foundation for his argument in chapter 1, focusing on the Middle Ages.Beginning with the historical records and quickly moving to Adam Davy's Five Dreams of Edward II and John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, Cornelius explores how Davy worries over Edward II's sexuality at the same time that he offers support for the new king.Lydgate revises the history of Edward II's reign by divorcing him from his sexuality while emphasizing his victimhood at the hands of Roger Mortimer.Chapter 2 is the crux of the book as it deals with Christopher Marlowe's influential play, Edward II.Cornelius argues that Marlowe's Edward II is essential in studying male-male desire prior to the twentieth century.Marlowe represents an identity crisis; specifically, Marlowe shows us Edward-the-queer vs. Edward-the-king.The collision of
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".