Date of publication : 26.3.20
The most kissy people in Ancient Europe by a long chalk, were the Christians. From their first gatherings in Imperial Rome, they were known for getting on with it. The Church Fathers taught that kissing on the lips was a lovely peaceful activity to which, ideally, everyone in the Whole World would sign up. Lips were the conscience of the body and the kiss was the physical expression of internal spirituality: ‘when your lips draw near to those of your brother, do not let your heart withdraw from his’. People would come to mass, have a kiss, go home. This went on for ages and people loved it.
(N.B. The only day of the year you weren’t allowed to kiss on the lips was Maundy Thursday because that was the anniversary of the false kiss of Judas. On that day, people cried instead. In England, the English King saw that this was so, and started giving out little foot-kisses to cheer up both himself and his people.)
Now, in Medieval Europe, with the growing corruption of the Catholic Church, people started kissing things, instead of people - Pax Boards (made in England). Worshippers would pass around the Pax Board during mass, kissing it as it went. Furthermore, the Erfurt Augustinian Johannes von Paltz, in his COELIFODINA (1502) quoting the hit sermon, KISSING (by his mentor Johannes von Dorsten), explained that there were now three distinct types of kissing : Praiseworthy, Excusable and Detestable.
It soon became clear that this kissing schism in the Catholic Church was only a taste of the chaos to come.
And so on to the reformation. 1517. Martin Luther was just furious about people kissing stupid Pax Boards made of silver and gold, but he didn’t mind kissing per se. And although he has a bad reputation for bringing about the death of fun, that’s not strictly fair. He wrote some good tunes and things might have been OK, but contemporary popular discourse lumped him in with the more radical revolutionaries, the Anabaptists, who kept doing embarrassing things while cheering ‘We love you, Martin Luther’. Just awful. The Anabaptists declared: ‘The brothers and the sisters, each to each, shall greet each other with an holy kiss. Those not in the fellowship shall not be greeted with a kiss, but with the words May the Lord Help You’. So Martin Luther, to distance himself from these twits, reluctantly gave up kissing.
However, the decline of kissing in Early Modern Europe did not immediately spread from the continent to England, which would remain kissy well into the 17th Century. Erasmus, on his travels to London, noted English kissyness to be ‘a very attractive custom’. Kissing was an important tool, too, within the English judicial system. English law sentenced people to kiss each other in order to solve disputes: these to be carried out on a day of reconciliation, commonly known as ‘love day’.
Over the channel in Germany, religious men were getting very worried about female witches kissing the devil on the arse - a detestable kiss that was spreading Satan’s filth - but it seems that the English didn’t really give a fuck about that. We just kissed willy nilly with a heigh nonny no.
Then, as the 17th Century matured, the English withdrew from the practice of the kiss. There are numerous theories as to why this happened. Some academics maintain that we wanted to align ourselves with the more sophisticated continental non-kissing Europeans (though this would turn out to be a long form practical joke). But there is also the possibility that we can blame a rat from London who, in 1665, gave one of us a little kiss which turned out to be the bubonic plague. This plague could be spread between people by kissing and touching and generally having fun, so this plague gave kissing an extremely bad name and nobody kissed each other all year and the city became a colder, crueller place to live. By 1666, a baker near Monument station was so damn chilly and lonely that he thought to warm himself up and accidentally warmed up the whole city of London until it got so warm it burned down.
After this mistake, there was no real rational reason for people not to go back to life as it had been before. The rats were gone. The buboes were gone. But somehow Londoners had gotten out of the habit of kissing, like with indoor smoking in 2009, and so when an Englishman went to kiss another Englishman on the lips, the receiver would sort of purse his lips in confusion and withdraw. Things weren’t helped when we got a Dutch king, who, in 1688, stopped the Maundy Thursday tradition of kissing his subjects’ feet. A sad day for the people of England.
Is that the truth? Who knows. But no one disputes that, with time, kissing in England grew to be a pastime hidden behind the closed doors of the marital chamber, down dark alleyways, and under the shade of the greenwood tree.
Towards the end of the 20th century, somebody said ‘why did we become stupid for three hundred years for no reason?’ and men started to kiss each other in public again. Women had generally been more kissy during this period anyway because they were less stupid and nobody really noticed what they were doing. So they knew how to do it really well and had a great head start and became CEOs of companies and taught men how to behave properly.
So where are we now?
There is no touching nowadaies, no kissing to be had in street or in park, nary a fiddle in the public houses nor a sweet stroke of calm in the hospital bed. Grandmothers separated from their kin by windows and the little children from their keyworker parents. Walls betwixt and between us and solitude the order of the hour. But O! how we long to touch and to be touched. So whither walk we? I invite you to travel with me back into the mystery of yesterday, as we simultaneously hurtle into the mystery of tomorrow with love in our hearts and potential on our lips…
FURTHER READING
(A GOOD BOOK)
Images
Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City : Nan Goldin (1980)
Medieval illuminated manuscript image
Nosferatu the Vampyre : Werner Herzog (1979)
The Stolen Kiss : Fragonard (1780)
Pope kissing : Osservatore Romano (2014)
Farewell of Saints Peter and Paul : Alonzo Rodriguez (16thC)
Kissing the hand of Queen Victoria