Kiss, Pre-Modern

As a sign of affection likely as old as humanity and probably older, since it is a behavioral trait that humans share with other primates, kissing is well attested in a broad body of textual and visual artifacts throughout ancient and medieval cultures. While thus possessing a certain degree of universality, like other gestures the kiss's meaning is ultimately culturally determined and, as such, dependent on context: Who is kissing whom? Before whom? For what reason? As Jean-Claude Schmitt (1990, p. 298) has observed of feudal ritual, by exchanging a kiss the parties indicate, to each other and to witnesses, that they share a mutually respectful intimacy and a social bond of community. It is precisely because the kiss is so culturally over-determined that its symbolic meaning can be, by turns, polysemous, ambiguous, or transgressive. A case in point: the kiss of Judas was on the one hand a simple sign by which Judas showed that Jesus was his "rabbi" or master; on the other, it was a gesture whose performative import was that of supreme betrayal.

A few textual examples drawn from the ancient world help elucidate the polysemous nature of the kiss. In his Life of Alexander, Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120 ce) describes two such occasions. After the boy Alexander successfully breaks the restive horse Bucephalus, his father Philip kisses him before the assembled company, exclaiming that his son should seek out a kingdom large enough for him since Macedonia is clearly too small (6.8). Later, having reached manhood, Alexander bestows a kiss before the public assembled in the theater upon his favorite, Bagoas, who has won a contest in singing and dancing (67.8). In each case, public recognition of an accomplishment, coupled with a newly enhanced social status, is expressed in the form of a kiss given by a superior to a man who is his inferior in age or status. The gesture, hierarchically structured yet suggestive of equality, serves to reaffirm a bond of affection, paternal in the first instance, erotic in the second, between men of public notoriety.

Some three centuries earlier, the Greek poet and originator of pastoral poetry, Theocritus (c. 320–c. 250 bce), some of whose verses celebrate love between an older man and a youth, describes in Idyll 12 a contest in Athens in which an arbiter seeks to determine which boy has the sweetest kiss. As with Plutarch's second example, kissing here occurs within a public and festive context, the playful description of which does not diminish its erotic charge. Finally, few classical texts can compare in erotic exuberance with Song 5 of the Catulli carmina by the Roman poet Catullus (c. 84–c. 54 bce), who enjoins his lover Lesbia to give him "a thousand kisses, then another hundred, / then another thousand, then a second hundred, / then yet another thousand, then another hundred" (lines 7-9). As with Theocritus, the ludic and formal qualities of Catullus's verse serve to heighten and refine his evocation of the passionate embraces between two lovers.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Song of Songs, which opens with the verse "Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth / for your breasts are better than wine" (1.1), underscores how the celebration of erotic love was recuperated and reinterpreted by Christian theologians to serve other, spiritual ends. Noting that the "curiously blatant eroticism of the Song of Songs is one of the most obvious features of the text" (1990, p. 32), E. Ann Matter argues that the Greek theologian Origen (c. 185–254) set the tone for the text's reception and interpretation in Christian exegesis. Origen, who acknowledged the inherent eroticism of the text, understood it to be an epithalamium, or wedding hymn, in which the bridegroom is God and the bride either the Church or the Christian soul. Saint Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate (the definitive Latin Bible), also translated Origen's Homilies on the Song of Songs into Latin, conferring on the controversial author's reading a stamp of approval that guaranteed its dissemination and continued influence in the Christian West. Thus, in his Sermons on the Song of Songs, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) interprets the kiss as a mystical one (spirituale osculum) from the mouth of Christ, with whom mystical union is achieved through a series of ascending spiritual kisses: of the feet (beginning stage of penitential devotion), of the hand (linked to practice of a holy life), and, finally, of the mouth (Matter, p. 125, on Bernard, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, Sermo III.i.1).

Despite this spiritualization of the kiss, mystical union with Christ was usually described in highly eroticized terms. In an example analyzed by Schmitt (1990, p. 297-299), Rupert of Deutz (c. 1070–1129) describes how in a vision Christ not only received his kiss as a gesture of love (gestum dilectionis) but opened his mouth so that Rupert could kiss him more deeply (os aperiret ut profundius oscularer) (Rupert of Deutz, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Matthaeum, as quoted by Schmitt, p. 298). Rupert's use of the word dilectio is particularly striking since this term was commonly used to refer to physical love between a man and a woman or, as in this case, two men.

In the liturgy of the medieval church (which seems to inform Bernard's three-step mystical kiss) and in feudal ritual, one sees most clearly how the kiss was the constitutive gesture of sanctified social bonds. In the Gospels the kiss does not seem to possess a ritualized significance, but Saint Paul's use of the formula for leave-taking with a sacred kiss (en philemati hagio) is highly suggestive of such a function. By the time of Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) the exchange of a kiss before the Offertory as a sign of charity was clearly the practice between Christians regardless of sex. Here again, tensions inherent in the kiss led to divergent understandings: The fact that the "sacred kiss" was exchanged between men and women in the early church was criticized by non-Christians. Its use was subsequently limited to those of the same sex, then further to specific contexts, such as the welcoming of newly baptized members, the reconciliation of penitents, or the consecration of bishops. The osculum pacis, or Kiss of Peace, given by the clergy to the faithful during mass, was similarly limited in the later Middle Ages to the clergy alone, with the substitution of a sacred object for the faithful to kiss. The Kiss of Peace was omitted from mass on Maundy Thursday (doubtless so as to avoid all reference to the Kiss of Judas) and from the Mass for the Dead (during which the Eucharist was not distributed to the faithful, perhaps in order to prevent the placing of a consecrated host in the mouth of the deceased). Thus, within the liturgy of the church the kiss was a gesture so highly charged that its practice underwent numerous changes, the thrust of which was to limit all possible ambiguity or contamination (Cabrol 1907).

The possibility of ambiguity in the kiss given by the feudal lord to his vassal in the ritual granting of a fief also seems to have elicited containment. This ritual, analyzed by Jacques Le Goff (1977), typically consisted of three aspects: a verbal declaration of faith by the vassal; homage, signified by the vassal's placing his hands between those of his lord (immixtio manuum); and finally the osculum, a kiss bestowed by the lord to the vassal mouth to mouth, ore ad os. Women, however, were apparently exempted from the osculum; nor did it figure in oaths of allegiance made by serfs. Indeed, while homage indicated the subservience of the vassal to his lord, the kiss denoted the recognition of mutual responsibilities and a thus a kind of parity. Its practice was therefore limited to noblemen (Le Goff 1977, p. 357).

There were also strikingly transgressive or subversive dimensions to the kiss. In a number of saint's legends, the kissing of a leper—sometimes followed by miraculous healing—indicated that the saint rejected his worldly status, as in Thomas of Celano's Second Life of Saint Francis, and embraced a bond of community with the most wretched (Peyroux 2000). In an entirely different register, courtly texts typically represent the kisses and embraces of lovers, often in a formulaic manner. A notable case of a transgressive kiss occurs in Canto V of Dante's Inferno (lines 127-138), when Francesca and Paolo, incited by their reading of a Lancelot romance, seal their fate by exchanging a kiss. Another couple whose reading, in the context of master and pupil, was interrupted by kissing with equally disastrous results is Abelard and Heloise, as related in the former's Historia calamitatum (c. 1132).

Sometimes, as has already been seen, a kiss could be given in the context of a game, as at the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century), where the lady who loses the game must receive a knight's kiss. This text then stages another kind of game in which Gawain and his host Bertilak swear to give each other what each has garnered over the course of three days, during which Bertilak is on the hunt and Gawain back at the castle, passively receiving the advances of his host's wife. Gawain dutifully renders to Bertilak the kisses received from his wife, first comlyly (line 1505, in a comely way), then hendely (line 1639, in a courtly way), and finally sauerly and sadly (line 1937, tastily or feelingly, and seriously or solemnly) (Dinshaw 1994, p. 206). In her discussion of this text, Carolyn Dinshaw notes that the exchange of kisses of a carnal kind was severely condemned by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who wrote in the Summa theologiae that kisses and embraces for the sake of carnal pleasure were mortal sins. For Peter Damian (1007–1072), a moral reformer obsessed with the prospect of sodomitical behavior among the clergy, such kisses were especially egregious when they occurred between men (Dinshaw 1994, p. 210). How then was a medieval reader (or hearer), who had certainly heard the sin of sodomy condemned from the pulpit or in the confessional, to understand the pleasurable kisses given by Gawain to Bertilak? As Dinshaw argues, the text presents rather perversely a test case in which the possibility of a homosexual—as opposed to a homosocial—bond is entertained, only to be ultimately contained.

A final example of a kiss between men that is fraught with sexual ambiguity occurs at the conclusion of the Pardoner's Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (VI, lines 943-955), when the Pardoner invites the Host to kiss his relics. After the latter angrily responds to this sexually ambiguous invitation with the threat of castration, the Knight's suggestion that the two should exchange the Kiss of Peace, as Robert Sturges notes, "ironically raises exactly the sodomitical possibilities that the Host angrily disavowed" (Sturges 2000, p. 9).

The above examples, chosen from among many, demonstrate that the kiss, overly invested as it was with multiple meanings of both a sexual and non-sexual nature, could be deployed in the interest of social cohesion but could in certain circumstances result in a cultural incoherence that threatened the very bonds it was meant to create.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cabrol, F. 1907. "Baiser." In Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. Dom Fernand Cabrol and Dom Henri Leclercq. Paris: Letouzey et Ané.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. 1994. "A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Diacritics 24(2-3): 205-226.

Le Goff, Jacques. 1977. "Le rituel symbolique de la vassalité." Pour un autre Moyen Age: Temps, travail et culture en Occident. Paris: Gallimard.

Matter, E. Ann. 1990. The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Peyroux, Catherine. 2000. "The Leper's Kiss." Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society. Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 1990. La Raison des gestes dans l'Occident médiéval. Paris: Gallimard.

Sturges, Robert S. 2000. Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse. New York: Saint Martin's Press.

                                             Robert L.A. Clark