and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. An expert in early modern social, cultural and political history, he has produced more than 14 books on subjects ranging from early modern correspondence to gender, politics and public history. He is Principle Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Gendered Interpretations of the V&A and Vasa Museums. He is co-Director of Cornerstone Heritage and with historian and TV presenter Dr Sam Willis, is co-Director of the Histories of the Unexpected public history brand. K it Heyam is a Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at King's College London. Previously, they were Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded project Gendered Interpretations of the V&A and Vasa Museums (Department of History, University of Plymouth). They specialise in sexual/ gendered transgression in medieval and early modern history and literature and work publicly and academically towards increased historical representation of queer experience. Their first monograph (forthcoming, Amsterdam University Press) investigates the development of Edward II's queer reputation, and their article 'Gender Nonconformity and Military Internment: Curating the Knockaloe Slides' (Critical Military Studies, 2019) proposes a methodology for curating historical trans possibility. | 107 MUSEUM international D avison Chiwara is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. His research focuses on conservation of cultural property and public participation in the arts.

This article discusses the interpretation and curation of the glass plate slides surviving from the First World War civilian internment camp at Knockaloe, Isle of Man, which show internees (all assigned male at birth) presenting as female in various situations. With reference to recent debates in heritage studies concerning the social agency of museums, and to the ways in which erasure of trans history is increasingly politically instrumentalised, it argues in favour of acknowledging the possibility that some internees' female presentation was motivated by female gendered subjectivity. The article discusses the circumstances in which people who were assigned male at birth presented as female in military contexts; considers the specific issues at stake when curating the history of marginalised groups; and analyses the multiple possible motivations for the female presentation shown in the Knockaloe slides. Consequently, it advocates a polyvocal curatorial approach, which validates the slides' trans possibility equally alongside other motivations. It concludes by arguing for a shift in the historiographical discourse of gender and military internment, including a more mindful approach to the use of gendered language.

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This chapter investigates how a consensus developed that Edward II was murdered by anal penetration with a red-hot spit. I question its interpretation by scholars as a self-evidently sexually mimetic, punitive murder method: in fact, the earliest accounts of this murder present it primarily as painful, torturous, and undetectable through outward inspection. Importantly, too, these earliest accounts emerge before the formation of a consensus on whether Edward’s transgressions were sexual, let alone whether they specifically constituted sex with men. This analysis prompts a reassessment of the place of this narrative in the history of queer sexuality, and of the murder scene in Marlowe’s Edward II, while also further illuminating the literary priorities of medieval and early modern chroniclers.

This chapter analyses accounts of Edward’s deposition and his subsequent imprisonment. I argue that early modern chroniclers exercised creative agency in selecting their sources for this period of Edward’s life, prioritising engaging anecdotes, emotionally compelling detail, and narrativity. In particular, they selected sources which facilitated the construction of Edward II’s reign as a de casibus narrative: a popular narrative structure characterized by the image of an ever-rotating ‘wheel of fortune’. Analysis of narratives of Edward II’s fall thereby enables us to appreciate the literary motivations of early modern chroniclers, and the way these motivations shaped their research process as well as their writing.