Jacke (Jack) Wilson

speaker

1,063 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Jacke (Jack) Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The History of Literature · 821 A History of the Kiss (with Katie Barclay) | Wonderland Books! (with Amy Joyce and Gayle Weiswasser) · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

Right.

Well, one of the fascinating things to me is not just that the characters did it, but that Chaucer would write it.

I mean, it really says a lot about where things stood and where he was in terms of putting that into a poem and the reception that it got and has gotten over the centuries that it tells us a lot about ourselves and as well as all of the readers since the days of Chaucer.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Okay, Abelard and Eloise.

Okay, you say, by the 17th century, the field of kiss poetry was so extensive that it became the subject of satire.

What were these kiss poems like?

Who was writing them and what were they about?

And how did they end up becoming satirized?

And it does kind of remind me of something you were talking about earlier, that a kiss is often not the culmination, but a beginning.

And there is a kind of feeling after you've been around for a while that, you know, making a kiss the be all end all is kind of eliminating a lot of other things, including a lot of hard work that might go into a relationship or a lot of life that has to be lived outside of a kiss.

Okay, well, we're running a little low on time, so I'm going to skip over Shakespeare's use of the kiss in Romeo and Juliet and the 18th century authors like Laurence Stern and Samuel Richardson and the use of the hand kiss, Eliza Haywood.

I'll leave that for our listeners to go read your book and see all about that.

Also, the kisses on the bottom of the letters in the form of a cross or an X. I found that passage to be really fascinating in your book.

But I wanted to just kind of ask you some bigger questions.

Were there any...

unusual practices or attitudes toward kissing that particularly surprised you or that you found or find difficult to understand?

Or were you just seeing in everything, ah, yes, that's recognizable.

I can see traces of that here, or I see our humanity there.

I can understand why the kiss was used that way or things like that.

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