Preface

      There were certain people, he said, who did not blush to write books even about the circumcision of the Lord.

      —Guibert of Nogent (d. 1124)

      Beginning in the twelfth century, after centuries of relative obscurity, Christ’s foreskin was suddenly difficult to miss across Christian Europe. Monasteries in France claimed to possess fragments of what they called the sanctus virtus (“holy virtue”), and produced legends explaining how this fragment of divine flesh came to be in their possession: it had been brought back from the holy land by none other than Charlemagne.¹ Jacobus de Voragine, author of the widely read Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) in the thirteenth century, recounted what was by then a common tale: “Now concerning the flesh of the Lord’s circumcision (de carne autem circumcisionis domini), it is said that an angel took it to Charlemagne, and that he enshrined it at Aix-la-Chapelle in the church of the Blessed Mary and later transferred it to Charroux, but we are told that it is now in Rome in the church called Sancta Sanctorum.”² Of course, Jacobus expresses some doubts about this legend, and even provides a more circumspect proposal of what happened to the foreskin: “But if this is true, it certainly is miraculous! But since that very flesh is truly of human nature, we believe that when Christ rose it returned to its own glorified place.”³ The miracle of Christ’s foreskin in European hands was already engendering skepticism in the twelfth century. Guibert of Nogent, a Benedictine monk with deeply held reverence for the resurrection body of Christ, complained about scurrilous and impious persons who claim to possess Jesus’ tooth, his umbilical cord, and his foreskin.⁴

      Despite monastic skepticism, the foreskin of Christ (or fragments of it) became ubiquitous. It was parceled into reliquaries, represented in art, and contemplated in devotional literature.⁵ Catherine of Siena, a lay mystic in the fourteenth century, imagined the wedding ring made for a virgin bride of God (perhaps even herself) fashioned out of Jesus’ foreskin.⁶ Agnes Blannbekin, a Beguine nun also in the fourteenth century, reported that she had visions of swallowing the sacred relic “hundreds of times.”⁷ Birgitta, who founded the Bridgettine Order of nuns in fourteenth-century Sweden, left a devotional tract in which she and the Virgin Mary also discussed the whereabouts of Christ’s foreskin (Mary assures her it is safe in Rome).⁸ Very quickly, it seemed, the foreskin was on everybody’s mind (and lips).

      Post-Enlightenment readers may shudder (or titter) at benighted medieval Christians so taken with a relic that is, to say the least, a bit unseemly.⁹ Yet to dismiss these monks, mystics, and pilgrims as merely superstitious is to overlook the theological creativity and innovation here at work. Christians in those centuries (like many people today) saw the body, and all its constituent parts, as a highly charged zone of signification, on which multiple boundaries were enacted.¹⁰ In an extremely technical commentary on the Catholic mass, written in the late twelfth century, Cardinal Lotario dei Conti di Segni spent many chapters explaining the miracle of the appearance of Christ’s real flesh on the altar. He paused, as he turned to discuss the transformation of wine into Christ’s blood, to ponder what happened to all those parts Christ shed on earth (blood, hair, foreskin). Did Christ take all of these with him in the resurrection? Or was it true (as “some say”) that Charlemagne received the foreskin from an angel, and that it resided now in the Santa Sanctorum of the Lateran Basilica? Lotario demurs: “Better to commit all things to God, than to dare to define something else.”¹¹ The desire to take hold of Christ’s flesh—on an altar or in a reliquary—articulated a central theological desire of Christianity to unite the human and divine materially. A few years later, Lotario, now Pope Innocent III, would preside over a council in that same Lateran basilica that made transubstantiation—the belief that Christ’s true body and blood were present on the sacramental altar—the official