Joseph Pucci earned an A.B. in history (with honors) at John Carroll University (1979); and both the A.M. in medieval history (1982) and the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (1987) from the University of Chicago. He taught at Loyola, Chicago (1986-1987); the University of Kentucky (1987-1989), holding a joint appointment in Honors and Classics; and since 1989 has been at Brown, rising from Visiting Assistant Professor (1989-1992) to Associate Professor (since 1997). Prof. Pucci also holds appointments in the Program in Medieval studies (since 1992) and in the Department of Comparative Literature ( since 2002). He is on the editorial board of the New England Classical Journal; has written nearly 40 articles and book reviews; and is the author of four books in print or preparation: Medieval Latin, rev. sec. ed. (Chicago, 1997); The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (Yale, 1998); The Personal Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus: A Translation (Hacket, 2009); and Augustine's Ancient Affections: Literary Memory and the Making of Affect in the Confessions (in review).

The manuscript tradition of Catullus tells a story of absence, confirming the view that Catullus was unknown in the centuries after Martial. But the witness of literary artists stretching from the fourth throuhg tht tenth centuries encourages us in another direction - or ought to. This paper cultivates that encouragement. My goals are, first, and more broadly, to demonstrate that Catullus is more widely known in late Latin antiquity than previously thought while, second, and more narrowly, to suggest that the words of Latin antiquity's most intimate poet were sometimes made to articulate or to criticize Christian spirituality. I shall have to say something, too, by way of explaining why Catullus proved attractive to Christian thinkers. And I hope to have some observations also on the dictional strategies used to deploy Catullus' words, for the two authors I examine seem to practive a kindred sort of engagment of Catullus - not quite allusion, certainly not quotation, but somewhere in between the two. I examine first the opening of the Confessions, where Augustine famously enjoins God be present to him; then I turn to one of the personal pieces composed for his close friend Agnes by the sixth-century poet Venantius Fortunatus.