This dissertation presents a significant revision of religious, social, and intellectual developments in thePoḷonnaruva period of Sri Lankan history (eleventh to early thirteenth centuries). While this period has long been acknowledged as a significant turning point in the history of Theravāda Buddhism, our understanding has been over-reliant on retrospective narrative accounts written in Pali and Sinhala. By turning instead to inscriptional evidence from within the period itself (written primarily in Sinhala, Tamil, and Sanskrit, and only exceptionally in Pali), a more granular and expansive understanding of the Poḷonnaruva period becomes available to us. Crucially, I argue that the histories of Buddhism, gender, and politics were fundamentally entwined in this period, and that we therefore cannot write one in isolation from the others. Royal women, absent from or downplayed within later narrative accounts, were fully participant in shaping the course of Buddhism; selective engagement with particular Buddhist institutions provided opportunities for the articulation of rival visions of ideal kingship; and those visions both relied on and were constitutive of notions of idealised masculinity. Attending to the specificities of these interrelations both allows us new insights into, and suggests new methodological approaches for, Theravāda history.