There is a great deal of kissing in Renaissance poetry, but modern critics do not generally recognise (as early readers did) that the literary conventions of the kiss were closely related to a fully-formed, lively and popular genre of Neo-Latin -kissing-poems-. Beginning with the imitation of Catullus in fifteenth-century Italy, this specialised form was securely established in the next century by the Dutch poet Janus Secundus, whose elegant Basia (-Kisses-) were an extraordinary international success. Secundus stimulated a long-lived tradition of Latin and vernacular -kisses-, willfully...