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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 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

And really that is the most common predominant kiss.

actually across the book, but across Europe until very recently where we suddenly get very squeamish about mouth kisses.

But the squeamishness is relatively new.

But where we see things like hand kisses or kissing a foot or kissing a behind, it's actually usually as a kiss that is designed to replace a mouth kiss.

So if you meet the Pope, you can't, he's too important and you're not allowed to kiss his mouth, but you are allowed to kiss his foot.

Or if you, similarly, so a lot of hand kisses are about hierarchies or about respect where the mouth kiss seems too intimate or in gender context where it might seem a bit salacious or inappropriate and people are worried about that.

But they're replacing a mouth kiss.

They're not meant to be, they're not kisses in their own right.

In a way, they're kisses that replace the real kiss.

And I think that's true actually until quite recently where we've like say cheek kisses are perhaps a bit different because they kind of come at a moment where we've decided that mouth kissing isn't really the done thing for quite a lot of people, people outside of lovers and families.

Yeah, actually that is actually a good kind of descriptor.

Yeah, we talk a little bit about the early Christian church because kissing is a really important part of Roman society and it's their kissing that really gets into the Christian church and that's where it kind of starts in Europe.

But the book itself really, that's just a little prelude, but really it starts in around 1200 where the kissing, I'd say it's probably the point in history where people are doing more mouth kissing than at any other point in history because there's just so many different kinds of opportunities for you to kiss each other on the mouth.

So you can start off in church because that's where it all starts, right?

So during the service, during mass, you are encouraged to turn and to kiss your neighbour on the mouth.

And so people do.

And so this is, and you say, peace be with you, and then you kiss on the mouth.

And so that's maybe the most famous mouth kiss.

And one...

So that is, we shake hands now, but yeah, you would have been kissing, and it was really important in the medieval period that you kissed on the mouth, because that's how you shared soul, and that's how the Christian community formed as one body, right?

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