Macrobius's Foreskin

Abstract

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.

Circumcision Debates in Sexology Magazine (1934–1975)

“…(p. 708) This argument will be an argument that appears throughout debates on circumcision, and if it is not the toe-nails, then it is finger nails, behind the ears, or under the eyelids. This argument also has significant historical precedent in which the foreskin has been compared to the eye (Strouse, 2016). Ultimately, Scott (1937) concludes: "in my opinion, the drawbacks and the potential disadvantages of circumcision constitute arguments against the operation sufficiently powerful to outweigh any value it may possess as a sanitary or prophylactic measure" (p. 710).…”