Kissing Matter: John Lydgate’s Lyric On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est and the Democratization of Contemplation

Abstract

This article examines the use of contemplation in the religious poetry of John Lydgate, a fifteenth-century Benedictine monk and poet from England. While our understanding of Lydgate as a Benedictine poet has gained scholarly momentum, his paraliturgical writings have received less sustained attention. In this article, I argue that Lydgate democratizes the millennium-old monastic practice of lectio and meditatio by introducing a new contemplative mode for lay- and non-Latinate people in the vernacular, which I refer to as a performative lectio domini. This lectio is on an image instead of scripture and takes place within the context of the liturgy. Lydgate offers directions for participation in a liturgical ritual, enabling his readers to fully inhabit the surplus of materiality, somatic movements, and figurative language emanating from the liturgy in order for them to abandon themselves to contemplation in the crux of the rite. By looking at the poem On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est as a case study, I demonstrate how for Lydgate the liturgical kiss becomes a threshold of encounter with Christ through the incarnation. Rather than producing an emotive response, as is often characterized, the liturgical kiss fosters an intellectual illumination and deeper knowledge of Christ crucified.