Christian writers have often conceptualized reading and writing in terms of uncircumcision. This study begins to uncover that long-standing literary-theoretical tradition. It describes how early Christian theologians, following Saint Paul, discussed allegory with metaphors of preputiotomy, and it considers how late antique authors inflected these formulations with anatomical understandings of the prepuce. Augustine provides a remarkable example of the foreskin as both a subject of anatomical study and as a mystical heuristic for allegorical-visionary experience; and Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio echoes anatomical writings on the prepuce in order to amplify the patristic figure into a fuller conceit. These examples lay the groundwork for imagining a poetics of the prepuce.

The norms of professionalization, viewed through a queer lens, are seen as a means to regulate affect and to banish queer forms of pleasure—much to the detriment of the academic profession. A queer, medievalist approach may help us with the project of building happier doctoral student selves. By looking at the indeterminancies and contradictions within medieval theories about “professions,” and by examining the queer valences of the first recorded use of the word professionalism (1856), we might open up spaces within our doctoral programs for productively “unprofessional” behavior.

Scholars have noted that Ausonius (ca. 310–395) plays with names in his poetry, but no one as yet has studied the poetic effects that Ausonius creates through naming. This article surveys several poems by Ausonius, showing how the poet crafts the nomen as a way to forge political alliances. The name’s political applications are shown to be an engagement with late antique onomastic practices. By attending to Ausonius’s use of names, we can interpret his Mosella as an allegory in which the poet provides advice to his student, Gratian, about how to relate to his brother, Valentinian II. This reading, which is corroborated by referring to Ausonius’s correspondence with Gratian, helps us to date the poem.

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