Katie Barclay

speaker

340 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Katie Barclay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

And she was the victim of it or one of his victims, I guess.

Well, Chaucer has one of the most famous ass kisses.

Are we allowed to say that?

What happens in the Miller's tale is that you have this young woman who's married to this old Miller.

And so it's kind of, you know, a May-December marriage, if you'd call it.

And she's another lover that's in the house as well.

But Absalom, he sees her in church and he really fancies her.

And he's trying to convince her to give him a kiss.

And she's like, I don't want to.

But he shows up in the middle of the night one night.

Well, she's managed to get her husband out of the way temporarily.

And her and her lover, her young lover, are kind of trying to do things and he's interrupting them.

So she's like...

okay I'll agree to give him a kiss to get it over with right and what she actually does though instead of putting her mouth out of the window to give him a kiss she puts her bum out and he kisses her on the ass and then he realises right away what had happened and he's completely disgusted and sorry this is a podcast you're wiping your tongue with your hands I'm showing how he's trying to wipe his tongue clean from the pollution that he feels he has experienced from that

And so it's one of the really kind of famous scenes, I guess, in literature.

But I think the reason I am kind of interested in it, I guess, is because it is a kiss, but it's an anti-kiss.

And it's not just a kiss on the lower part of the body or a disgusting place.

It's kind of the opposite of the kiss, because a kiss on a mouth

is an entrance to the body.

It's also a holy entrance where you put clean food and you put good things and purity and you share soul.

Showing 241–260 of 340 · page 13 of 17