[HN Gopher] Kissing in the Middle Ages
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       Kissing in the Middle Ages
        
       Author : pepys
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2022-02-23 06:43 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.medievalists.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.medievalists.net)
        
       | cantrememberpw8 wrote:
       | The article's claim about the Council of Vienne is incorrect: the
       | Council was condemning the errors of the Beghards and Beguines,
       | one of which errors was the claim that a woman's kiss was sinful
       | [1]. Thus, the Council was in fact saying it was _not_ sinful to
       | kiss romantically.
       | 
       | [1] https://sensusfidelium.com/the-sources-of-catholic-dogma-
       | the...
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | I'm reading the Cambridge history of medieval europe and it
       | observes quite frequently that people had literal real fears of
       | the afterlife, and that the word-is-my-bond thing had some
       | immediate currency. Popes were able to issue directions to kings
       | and dukes, which required them to do things, and without Stalin's
       | "where is the pope's army" reality, they accepted the direction.
       | [I personally suspect that the ability of the pope to use
       | religious fervour to call on OTHER kings and dukes for an army
       | probably heavily influenced things, but it would be wrong to deny
       | the religious aspect. Life was short and brutal, and there was no
       | evident tolerance for athiesm, at least as recorded in this kind
       | of history. It took the later rennaisance and reformation for
       | aspects of roman/greek atheism to enter the conversation, and
       | christians were just as likely as any other faith to deny truths
       | in other written works and destroy them]
       | 
       | A belief that a kiss represented a bond, a contract, that the
       | kiss itself was bound into the agreement, and represented a
       | material part of the agreement does not surprise me. Nor, that it
       | forms a bond of fealty, and to disrupt the ceremony required
       | acceptance of a change in law.
       | 
       | Remember this is a time where at least for the nobility, to swear
       | on oath you didn't do something was in some circumstances
       | sufficient to be found not guilty. High status people did
       | embarrasingly public penance to get out of excommunication.
        
       | loa_in_ wrote:
       | I made it halfway through the article but I couldn't stand it
       | interpreting all instances of "kiss" as kiss on the mouth. Kisses
       | on the cheek would just as well be written down as simply kisses.
        
         | scintill76 wrote:
         | Do you have specific linguistic and cultural knowledge of that?
         | It doesn't seem so obvious to me (a layman).
        
         | ksdale wrote:
         | Or perhaps a kiss on the cheek wouldn't even register as a kiss
         | and would be recorded as a greeting instead?
        
       | throwaway5486nv wrote:
       | People not kissing often would have been a black mirror story
       | back then. High tech low touch
        
       | black-tusk wrote:
       | Yug88
        
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       (page generated 2022-02-23 23:00 UTC)