The poetry of Western Europe, in the period of its ‘early modernity’—in this case, let us say, from around Boccaccio's time to the waning of the age of Rococo, though the scope of the present study is not quite so wide—was full of kisses: repeated kisses, with a complement of repeating but evolving figures through which they were stylistically realized. Critical readers, for the most part, are so used to them that their functions and histories go unquestioned. In exceptional cases we may be struck by something compellingly different in the presentation. At other times, the thing most likely to strike a modern reader or scholar about a given literary kiss is its very conventionality; and it is all too easy to take conventions for granted, unless we have a good reason for being interested in them. Part of my argument in this book is that the conventions of the kiss in Renaissance poetry are worth examining, and that such an examination might make us more sensitive to the subtlety with which convention is treated in this or that example, as the poet variates upon a well-tried theme. But what makes the incidental kiss worth notice, what gives the literary scholar an excellent reason for attending to the conventions with which so many of these kisses are engaged, is the fact that the Renaissance had actually generated a complete poetic genre almost entirely devoted to the subject of kissing.

The tradition began in the fifteenth century, with the imitation of a handful of ancient poems. As the High Renassiance reached its culmination, the poem of kissing developed into a fully conventionalized Latin ‘kind’. The Basia of Janus Secundus, let loose upon the humanist world in 1541, set the pattern for another hundred years and more of Latin kiss-poems, not to mention French baisers, Italian baci, and all manner of kissing, bussing and biting in vernacular verse across Europe. Succeeding chapters will show the kiss-poem in the process of becoming generic, blossoming, and then exhausting itself as a formal genre whilst continuing to spread ever wider as a mode. In the latter guise it crept into other genres without losing its own generic identity, and so its life was extended.