[HN Gopher] Kissing in the Middle Ages ___________________________________________________________________ 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 ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-23 23:00 UTC)