Katie Barclay

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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.

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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

And in fact, in the medieval context, the kiss might actually just make your loneliness worse, right?

So there's a really great medieval story about two people who, like somebody who has unrequited love and he thinks if they just give them a kiss, they will then, that will somehow resolve this tension and the love will disappear.

Yeah.

and so eventually the person agrees to kiss them and they do but it's just one kiss so it doesn't actually solve the problem and actually makes it worse because now he not only has unrequited love he also has a whole lot of emotions around this kiss that can never be repeated and so the medieval literature gave us a good lesson there about maybe not getting what we want

What all kisses have in common is about community and is about symbolising some kind of shared bond.

And I think that maybe I'm naively optimistic.

I wrote a book on Caritas, neighbourly love.

I'm interested in the ways that we as communities and groups show affection for each other, show kindness and care and the ways that we can actually inscribe that in culture.

And what really the kiss shows us is that actually we're using the kiss to do that kind of emotional work and to symbolise the emotional work of community in a really broad range of contexts.

And that's much more the case in the medieval period than now.

But some of those traditions really do carry on.

So people kiss to sign contracts and they kiss their lord to show their loyalty.

And of course, you kiss in families as greetings.

There's

All of these Kissies that symbolize this kind of affectionate community.

And to me, they are maybe just as interesting as the romantic Kissies between two lovers.

It is a book on the European kiss, partly because the European context inflicts the kiss, it's a Christian context, it inflicts the kiss with particular meanings about sharing of breath, union of souls, which is why it's significant in a whole range of relationships.

And so I wanted to kind of frame it around that.

And then the kisses that we see in the book are, so the kiss, the Christian kiss, which were the bookstops, is a mouth kiss.

Two people kiss each other on the mouth.

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