KISSING is a serious business for Professor Katie Barclay. A native of Lanarkshire working in Australia, her new popular history, The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power, published this month, gives readers an overview of 1000 years of the cultural world of kissing.
This is no small task. The kiss, Barclay says, is an “enduring and flexible symbol” which is “at once strange and familiar”.
Hers is a history of the changing meanings of a symbol over centuries, of social practices and of representations. For modern audiences, the “romantic kiss” predominates, an expression of sexual desire, passionate connection and intimacy. As Barclay’s book shows, it was not always thus.
Each chapter provides an introduction to different cultural forms of kissing in European history. In the medieval world, the kiss was seen as a “transformative act”, which led to its use in a range of legal, political and religious contexts.
The kiss of peace was intended to manage conflict and was deployed in legal practice as a mechanism through which people became part of a loving, Christian community, a display of “caritas”, or neighbourly love.
Kisses of fealty, or homage, were exchanged – or refused, while the saintly smooched lepers in pursuit of spiritual perfection.
With the efficacy of kisses of peace and homage rather doubtful, the medieval imagination also featured “Judas kisses” of treachery and betrayal. Medieval culture was enamoured, too, with contradictions and inversions, giving rise to the transgressive “arse kiss”, a corrupted holy ritual imagined as beloved by witches and heretics.
Depicted in manuscript marginalia – sometimes inventively involving monkeys – mention of the “arse kiss” was a vibrant insult and could have serious consequences. At the court of James VI of Scotland – a man who was no stranger to profanity – use of this insult led to a fatal fight between courtiers.
Other depictions were intended as humorous, such in David Lyndsay’s morality play, The Three Estates (1540), where the character of the Pardoner, a person licensed to sell indulgences by the Church, advises that a couple can be obtain a divorce by recourse to an unholy kiss.
By the 18th century, kisses proliferated in some forms and decreased in others, remaining a spectacle through which people organised their social and political affections.
During the French Revolution, politicians exchanged fraternal kisses and political kissing might be associated with egalitarian aspirations.
Mouth kissing retained its primacy in some countries and contexts but social elites increasingly preferred hand kissing ceremonies, which reinforced the importance of the person kissed and the humility of the kisser.
Hand kissing also offered a useful alternative to mouth kissing for unrelated men and women but, it would seem, almost all kisses were haunted by anxieties about sex and morality.
In England, kisses played a role in elections and the practice of men kissing the wives and daughters of voters led to ribald illustrations. After satirical and sexualised attacks on the Duchess of Devonshire, an aristocrat who offered to kiss voters as part of campaigning for her favoured candidate, kissing women was no longer seen as a respectable electioneering practice.
Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss is perhaps one of the most famous depictions of the romantic, passionate kiss.
Depicting Francesca and Paulo, two adulterous lovers murdered by an irate spouse, who appear as characters in Dante’s Inferno, The Kiss was one of many such representations of a late 19th-century “new iconography of osculation”.
A contemporary depiction of two female sex workers kissing in bed by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was considered too spicy even for French audiences, and was only shown at exhibition to select clients.
Older, community-facing forms of the kiss, such as that of peace and fealty, were now a distant memory, and in their place, Barclay argues, had risen a kiss associated with romantic love and especially, sex.
Advice literature, such as the succinctly titled Kissing: The Art of Osculation (1888), imagined submissive women and assertive male lovers, while the advent of early filmmaking saw romantic kisses depicted on screen and dissected by critics.
The iconography of the romantic kiss was elaborated on in popular culture, and often in letters between lovers. The use of a cross to demarcate a kiss became commonplace, sometimes to excess.
An 1898 headline in a regional newspaper from England which detailed a legal action for breach of promise, told of a decade-long courtship, during which the woman involved had received, and tallied up, a grand total of 15,000 crosses in 1000 letters.
Despite this “explosion of kisses on stage, and on screen and in letters”, public kissing between ordinary lovers could still be contentious.
The Irish Free State in the 1930s legislated against behaviour which could “offend modesty… or injure the morals of the community” and at the beginning of the 1960s in Scotland a local complained to the letters page of the Dunoon Observer that American sailors visiting the town were kissing their Scottish girlfriends in public.
“It is only out of politeness that the community has suffered in silence,” they wrote, “The embarrassment caused by sailors keeping their secret passion anything but secret.”
The romantic kiss, Barclay argues, provided a device where the boundaries of love, morality, sexuality and gendered power could be negotiated in a rapidly changing world.
Kisses of life and death have also had their place in European culture. The kiss has had a long association with death, with the dying and dead ritually kissed for centuries, a practice depicted in funerary artworks.
Kisses of life, both as practical resuscitation and as a symbol of lifegiving, survived the understandable obsession of 19th century Europeans with hygiene to feature in a dizzying range of cultural productions from classic Disney films to The Matrix.
Attending to the kiss, Barclay argues, opens up a history of how people have related to each other in many types of ways, variously marking the union of those who shared religious beliefs, political outlook, friendship, romantic love, familial connection and even a common humanity.
Not simply a shallow gesture, it points to structures of social relationships, political life and community organisation.
Through kissing, Europeans made commitments to each other and those who watched, performed social hierarchies and loyalties, and highlighted who they loved, and who they did not.
Today, the practice of kissing is, Barclay reminds us, imbued with historic and cultural meanings which inform new representations and feelings.
“When we kiss,” she concludes, “we kiss with the power of history.“
The Kiss: A History Of Passion And Power by Professor Katie Barclay is published by Reaktion Books
