The pax or pax board was an object used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance for the kiss of peace in the Catholic Mass. Direct kissing among the celebrants and congregation was replaced by each in turn kissing the pax, which was carried around to those present. A wide range of materials were used, and the form of the pax was also variable but normally included a flat surface to be kissed. Often the pax was held out with a long handle attached, and it seems to have been given a wipe with a cloth between each person. Some paxes are very elaborate and expensive objects, and most survivals fall into this class, but the great majority were probably very simple wood or brass pieces. It was usual to include an image, usually of or including the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ.Oxford; CE
The pax began to replace actual kisses in the 13th century, apparently because of a range of concerns over the sexual, social and medical implications of actual kissing. It is first documented in England, and the 17th-century historian of the Mass, Cardinal Giovanni Bona, associated the introduction with the Franciscan Order. The person holding the pax said and received the response ("Peace to you", "And with your spirit"). The pax gradually fell out of general use, though the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1911 said it was still practised when "prelates and princes" were involved, but "not to others except in rare cases established by custom".CE In the 20th century the physical kiss, now more often a handshake, was revived in the Mass (though reduced in practice again during the COVID pandemic).
was the Latin name, with , and as alternatives. Pax was also used in English, in which they were also called a pax board and pax-brede, or paxbrede. Another Latin term was , still sometimes used in Italian and German.Mantello and Rigg, 163; Oxford; Kuhn, pp. 725–726, under "pax" and "paxbrede" The modern term pax tablet may be used, especially by church historians, where art historians mostly favour pax. Osculatory is used in some 19th-century sources,OED, "Osculatory" and some claim that this refers to a pendant form, worn round the neck by the priest. This does not appear in most modern scholarship, though given a one-line entry by Oxford Art Online."osculatory." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed May 31, 2015, online Translators unfamiliar with the concept may introduce still further names into English. ('kiss-board') is one of the German names.
History The kiss of peace was included in the Mass of the Western Church from the 2nd century at least, and the Eastern Church had its equivalent. The kiss was only supposed to be exchanged between members of the same sex, but numerous references to inter-sex kissing show that this continued to be a possibility.Harvey, 23–24 An exception to this was the Nuptial Mass for weddings, where the priest kissed the bridegroom, who then kissed the bride.Oxford Other exceptions were masses in the days before Easter, when the association with the treacherous kiss of Judas might be too strong, and the kiss of peace was omitted entirely.Duffy, 29; Harvey, 23
The pax board, as a substitute for the kiss of peace, is first mentioned in 1248 in the statutes of the Archbishop of York, and seems to have been an English invention, perhaps restricted to England until the next century. The statutes of a synod of the Diocese of Exeter in 1287, and an inventory of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London of 1297 provide the next mentions. By 1328 the post-mortem inventory of the possessions of Queen Clementia of Hungary, widow of King Louis X of France, included ('a silver pax').Harvey, 20–21
Early texts of the major work by Guillaume Durand, Bishop of Mende in southern France,Mende, Lozère, Languedoc-Roussillon which was circulating from 1286, do not mention the pax. However, the first vernacular translation, in French from 1382, has an inserted mention of .Harvey, 21 A synod in Prague in 1355 is the first mention from the Holy Roman Empire; the synod recommended that the pax should be introduced if congregations were reluctant to exchange actual kisses.Harvey, 21 Other evidence, including surviving paxes, shows it spread at least to Italy, Germany and Spain, and was probably standard in Western European churches by the Reformation.Harvey, 21–23; Oxford
In Protestantism the pax, and all thought of actual kisses, was abandoned as useless and undesirable symbolic distractions from faith, although the pax was not singled out for much special disparagement in Protestant polemics, with the exception of Richard Baxter, who gave it among a list of other irrational violations of the Second Commandment, saying:
To worship God as the papists do, with images, Agnus Dei's, crucifixes, crossings, spittle, oil, candles, holy water, kissing the pax, dropping beads, praying to the Virgin Mary, and to other saints, repeating over the name of Jesus nine times in a breath, and saying such and such sentences so oft, praying to God in an unknown tongue, and saying to him they know not what, adoring the consecrated bread as no bread, but the very flesh of Christ himself, choosing the titular saint whose name they will invocate, fasting by feasting upon fish instead of flesh, saying so many masses a day, and offering sacrifice for the quick and the dead, praying for souls in purgatory, purchasing indulgences for their deliverance out of purgatory from the pope, carrying the pretended bones or other relics of their saints, the pope's canonizing now and then one for a saint, pretending miracles to delude the people, going on pilgrimages to images, shrines, or relics, offering before the images, with a multitude more of such parcels of devotion, do most heinously dishonour God, and, as the apostle truly saith, do make unbelievers say, "They are mad," (1 Cor. 14:23), and that they are "children in understanding," and not "men," (1 Cor. 14:20). Baxter, 546
Another exception were the Anabaptists, who instead kissed on meeting both in normal life and at services; this only stiffened the disdain felt by other Protestants.Harvey, 24–28
By about 1600 the use of the kiss of peace had declined and changed in Catholic practice as well. No longer regarded as a general ceremony of reconciliation, but as one of greeting those deserving honour, it was now restricted to the clergy and the choir, as well as magistrates and male nobility. It was performed at the beginning of High Mass, whereas the pax board had previously been more often associated with the less ceremonial Low Mass. According to the Oratorian liturgical historian Father Pierre Lebrun (1661–1729), the decline in Catholic use was because of the disputes over precedence that it caused.Senn, 188–189
Another factor may have been that kissing the pax had clearly come to act as a substitute for receiving the Eucharist for many of the faithful, avoiding the need for fasting and other prescribed preparations for Holy Communion.Harvey, 22; Duffy, 125
In modern Catholicism use of the pax is confined to a few religious orders, such as the Dominicans, "The Pax Instrument", Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P. and individual churches.
Cause of disputes
As earlier with the actual kiss, the pax was often the cause of bad feeling and sometimes actual violence because the order in which it was kissed, descending down the religious and social hierarchy, gave rise to disputes over precedence. Geoffrey Chaucer in The Parson's Tale from his Canterbury Tales, wrote:
And yet is there a private species of Pride that waits first to be greeted ere he will greet, although he is less worthy than that other is, indeed; and also he expects or desires to sit, or else to go before him in the way, or kiss the pax, or be incensed, or go to the offering before his neighbor, and such similar things, beyond what duty requires, indeed, but that he has his heart and his intent in such a proud desire to be made much of and honored before the people.Translation by L.D. Benson, Harvard
In The Wife of Bath's Tale Chaucer makes it clear that she was just such a person.Duffy, 12 Christine de Pisan complained of such behaviour, among women in particular, pointing out that the pax "is for the little people as much as the big ones". She recommended just hanging the pax on the wall of the church "on a nail and let whoever wants to kiss it do so". This was actually recommended by a synod in Seville in 1512, which said the pax should be fixed rather than carried round the church. Thomas More also complained that "men fall at variance for kissing of the pax".Harvey, 24
The historian Eamon Duffy in his The Stripping of the Altars recounts that:
In 1494 the wardens of the parish of All Saints, Stanyng, presented Joanna Dyaca for breaking the paxbrede by throwing it on the ground, "because another woman of the parish had kissed it before her." On All Saints Day 1522 Master John Browne of the parish of Theydon-Garnon in Essex, having kissed the pax-brede at the parish Mass, smashed it over the head of Richard Pond, the holy-water clerk who had tendered it to him, "causing streams of blood to run to the ground." Brown was enraged because the pax had first been offered to Francis Hamden and his wife Margery, despite the fact that the previous Sunday he had warned Pond, "Clerke, if thou here after givest not me the pax first I shall breke it on thy hedd."Duffy, 126–127
On the other hand, a "ribald carol" where a female narrator recounts various flirtatious advances made at mass includes the verse:
"Jankin at the Agnus bered the pax-brede; He twinkled but said nout, and on my fot he trede Kyrieleison"Duffy, 12; Jolly Jankyn, text
As art Paxes with elaborate metalwork framing an image in a medium that would withstand kissing and wiping are the sort that have been most likely to survive. Other objects that might seem to have had another purpose, such as plaquettes, ivory panels or small painted enamel plaques, may have been made for a pax. Equally other objects began life as serving some other purpose, and were turned into paxes.12th-century enamel example, British Museum Some still have a metal fitting at the rear, either a handle or a slot for a long wooden handle to fit into, of which a few have survived. Glass or rock crystal over an image below allowed the image to be kissed repeatedly but not damaged, and enamel also wore relatively well. Carved shell and mother of pearl are sometimes used. Even with a frame paxes are usually less than a foot high, and the images often high. The inventory of the royal treasure of King Richard II of England lists many paxes among its nearly 1,200 items, including two of plain ungilded silver with red crosses, which Jenny Stratford suggests were for use in Lent. Several record who gave them, or from whom they were seized for offences.Stratford, items R1139-40, commentary on p.375