Katie Barclay, "The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

August 1, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the medieval church, worshippers kissed each other on the mouth during the service—not as a romantic gesture, but as a ritual that formed the Christian body. By the 19th century, psychologists were warning parents that kissing their children too much could make them neurotic or homosexual. And as late as the 1500s, legal codes still required a kiss on the mouth to seal a land contract. Katie Barclay, a historian of love, has collected these and many other kisses across a thousand years of European history in her book The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power. The result is a study of a single gesture that once did far more cultural work than it does today—and whose narrowing meanings tell a larger story about how we came to think about intimacy, privacy, and consent.

The Mouth Kiss as a Multipurpose Social Tool

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What you'll learn

1 (01:35) **Introduction: Why a History of the Kiss?** - Host Dr. Random Elcher welcomes Professor Katie Barclay to discuss her book *The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power*, which traces the changing meanings of the mouth kiss across centuries and cultures.
2 (03:58) **The Medieval Kiss: A Multi-Purpose Public Gesture** - Barclay explains that before 1300, the mouth kiss was far more common and served many functions beyond romance, especially in public and religious life.
3 (05:56) **The "Anti-Kiss": Heresy and the Kiss of the Anus** - Barclay describes how the church used a degraded form of kissing to mark heretics and outsiders as the opposite of the holy mouth kiss.
4 (08:05) **Kissing in the Middle East: A More Rigid Hierarchy** - Barclay contrasts European kissing with practices in the medieval Middle East, where the kiss was even more explicitly tied to political hierarchy.
5 (09:34) **The Disappearance of the Feudal Kiss** - Barclay examines when and why the kiss as a legal and contractual gesture vanished, noting that the shift is surprisingly hard to pin down.
6 (11:35) **The Greeting Kiss: A Fashion That Comes and Goes** - Unlike the feudal kiss, the kiss of greeting or friendship has fluctuated in popularity over the centuries, which may explain our persistent modern discomfort with it.
7 (13:15) **The 19th Century War on Kissing: Germs, Psychology, and Consent** - The 19th century was a deeply anti-kiss era, driven by new anxieties about disease, child development, and the very meaning of the gesture.

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Show Notes

The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Katie Barclay tells the surprising history of our most intimate gesture: the kiss. Richly illustrated, it explores a millennium of kisses, asking how and why the kiss has retained its power over the centuries, and what it might mean today. From the furtive kisses of fated lovers Heloise and Abelard to The Godfather’s ‘kiss of death’, Professor Barclay shows how the kiss can be romantic, peaceful, transgressive, intimate, erotic and more. There are kisses that are bad ideas, dangerous kisses and funny ones. New kisses are invented and old ones fall out of favour. 

While the kiss continues to change, Professor Barclay shows that we kiss fewer people, and less often, than we used to. The Kiss reveals a cultural inheritance transmitted in story and song, art and literature, and through the everyday kisses that we receive from our parents, or reserve for our lovers; when we kiss, we kiss with the weight of history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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