Overview

The Holy Prepuce was the foreskin of Jesus, removed at his circumcision on the eighth day after birth, venerated as a relic in medieval and early modern Catholicism. Theological reflection made it unusually significant: if Christ ascended bodily into heaven, the foreskin was among the few pieces of his flesh that might have remained in the world, and this reasoning drove a lively cult. The result was an embarrassment of relics, with many churches at once asserting that they held the authentic foreskin.

The subject was always delicate, mixing intense devotion with an evident indecorum that later churchmen found difficult, and by 1900 the Church moved to silence it altogether. Today no venerated Holy Prepuce is known to survive, the most famous example having disappeared in the late twentieth century, so the relic is chiefly of interest as a case study in the excesses and eventual regulation of the medieval relic trade.