David Farley and Tony Perrottet Know Dick

Last night I headed out to The Diamond bar in Brooklyn for an evening of penis-themed entertainment featuring David Farley, author of An Irreverent Curiosity, and Tony Perrottet, author of Napoleon’s Privates.

In An Irreverent Curiosity, journalist David Farley spends a year living in the bizarre Italian castle-town of Calcata trying to discover whatever became of the town’s claim to fame, a reliquary containing Jesus’ foreskin, which went missing in 1986. Saints were the rock stars of the medieval world, and for a time every church was required to possess a relic, which created a massive opportunity for scam artists. The transparent fraudulence of so many relics undermined the Church’s credibility and helped lead to the Reformation. (John Calvin quipped that there were enough pieces of the True Cross floating around Europe to build a ship.) Since doctrine held that Jesus had ascended bodily, the only part of him that might conceivably be hanging around on earth was his foreskin, which eventually turned up — supposedly given to Charlemagne in Jerusalem by an angel — and was recognized by the Pope as authentic. The Church even granted a plenary indulgence (remission of sins) to any pilgrims who would come and worship the Holy Foreskin. During the sacking of Rome the foreskin was carried off by a French knight, who was later captured in Calcata and who stashed the reliquary under some manure in his cave-cell. Centuries later the relic was rediscovered, and the people of Calcata began holding an annual procession with the foreskin as the main attraction. Later the Church became intensely embarrassed about the whole business. The people of Calcata were very attached to their yearly parade, so the Church allowed the practice to continue, but only under the condition that nobody displayed the foreskin at any other time and that nobody talked about the foreskin at all, under threat of excommunication.

I haven’t read the other book, Napoleon’s Privates, but the author talked about it a bit. Apparently Napoleon was extremely obnoxious to his surgeon, so when Napoleon died the surgeon got back at him by cutting off his private parts during the autopsy. Napoleon’s penis bounced around to different countries before finally ending up with a collector in New Jersey, where Tony Perrottet found it and surreptitiously made a replica, which he displayed last night. Another interesting fact he mentioned was that Napoleon was not in fact short. Napoleon’s height (5’6”) was pretty much average for his day. The idea that Napoleon was a shrimp seems to have been an invention of British propagandists.