What's in a kiss, anyway?

Just at the end of Spring semester this year, I was preparing a paper for a workshop I was co-organizing on Gender, Emotions and Material Culture in Scandinavian History. The workshop was hosted by UGPS Umeå Group for Premodern Studies, UCGS Umeå Centre for Gender Studies (both Umeå University) and ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (University of Western Australia), and it was an intimate explorative workshop with specially invited participants. My paper put forward some reflexions and questions on the theme 'The sulking saint and the headless Jesus: Aspects of materiality and emotions on material sacredness and sacred heritage in post-Reformation Sweden', and while researching and putting together my presentation I was struck by the number of kisses and sensual gestures that (unexpectedly, to me) emerged from my material. 

'Kissing the Relic', oil painting by Joaquín Sorolla (1893)

In the implementation of the Reformation in Sweden, and particularly after the parliament of Västerås in 1544 where a number of Catholic items and practices - lighting devotional candles, burning incense, the use of monstrances and Holy Water, etc - were explicitly forbidden, a new and dramatically different approach to sacred materiality developed. These changes also mirror quite well the heritagisation effects on holy matter: from touching to no touching (if not with white gloves), from sensuality to material preservation, from interaction and communication to one-direction information, from dialogue with material sacredness to cultural or historical admiration. And: from kissing to respectful distance. 

Devotional kissing of the relic of Virgin Mary's girdle while on display in Moscow (normally to be found on Mount Athos)

Facing all those examples in written sources, paintings, satires etc on a sensual past long gone and replaced by a more intellectual view on holy matters, where control of the body, senses and general appearance were major virtues, I had to ask myself: What does it do to a culture when sensuality is banned - in religion, or elsewhere?

Mocking the kissing of the Pope's foot. Satire woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder from 'Passionary of the Christ and Antichrist', early 16th century.

The sources for my Master thesis in History of Ideas and Science touched upon this a little. In the Swedish national inventories for antiquities, performed by order of the King from 1666 throughout the century and mostly executed by the local clergy, Catholic practices are mentioned and mocked. One example are the monks said to have been dancing in a field every year before a pilgrimage to Trondheim in Norway, and so violently that the marks in the ground could still be seen decades later. Or another, where the priest giving the report in late 17th century describes how the boards of a liturgic coffin where a wooden Christ was laid during the Holy Week liturgies, were 'licked with the lips so that it was smooth and worn'. I wonder, and presently without a clear answer, where all this kissing and devout relationship to sacred materiality went after 1544 and the eventual establishment of the Reformation?

 Girl kissing a relic of S:t Clare on the Saint's feast day in Monastery of Poor Clares, Laguna, Philippines

Were the physical means of expressing emotions all intellectualized with the change of religious teachings? And in any case, for my research interest: How did the travelers from this (in a religious context) non-kissing country up North react to the physical and emotional expressions in Italy and in Catholic practice? Fact is, I have already found a number of sources giving interesting information on this... but I won't give away every juicy part of my dissertation before it is finished, so I'll get back to you on that topic. Stay patient!

So. What's in a kiss, anyway? Beyond doubt a kiss is so much more than the general romantic kiss between lovers, but is it even always a good thing? It can be soaked in symbolic meaning, far beyond the visual, like the kiss of peace, the kissing of a ring or the feet of someone as an act of subjection, or it can be a kiss of betrayal.

Humble and symbolically charged kissing. Pope Francis kissing the foot of an inmate at juvenile detention centre of Casal del Marmo in Rome, Holy Thursday liturgy 2013. (Photo: The Globe and Mail)

Betrayal kissing. The kiss of Judas, oil painting by Caravaggio (1602)

I would like to wrap up these thoughts on kisses, kissing and sensual experience of strongly charged objects, and the possible effects when this dimension is removed, by giving you some lines from a favorite poem. It is by e e cummings, voices to voices, lip to lip (Read the whole poem here, and a short interpretation here. I recommend it.):

(While you and i have lips and voices which

are for kissing and to sing with

who cares if some oneyed son for a bitch

invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

each dream nascitur, is not made...)

why then to Hell with that: the other; this,

since the thing perhaps is

to eat flowers and not to be afraid.