Bearing cards, flowers, chocolates and poetry, lovers have all the time swooned on Valentine’s Day as cherubs circled overhead. Right?
Or is the history darker, marked by Roman bacchanalia, martyrs and lies?
Innumerable legends claim to clarify the origins of Valentine’s Day, but as is the case with legends, they leave many questions unanswered. Here are a number of:
Where did Valentine’s Day originate?
For years, the consensus amongst historians was that the vacation had something to do with an ancient Roman festival called Lupercalia that fell in mid-February. Noel Lenski, a Yale University historian, pointed to the seasonal and thematic connections between Lupercalia and modern Valentine’s Day.
Both are erotic festivals, in a way, but the traditional one — which included pairing off ladies and men by lottery — also involved religious purification and atonement.
“Naked young men, drunk, would go running around Palatine Hill swatting virginal women with strips of dog fur and goat fur to make them fertile,” Lenski said.
According to 1 legend, Pope Gelasius desired to put an end to the debauchery within the late fifth century. He declared Feb. 14 because the feast day of a St. Valentine, who had been martyred about 200 years before.
But that theory emerged in an 1807 book with none evidence to support the connection, said Elizabeth White Nelson, a University of Nevada Las Vegas history professor.
“People who think that’s the story haven’t read the letter that he actually wrote about Lupercalia,” she said, referring to the pope. “Is he pissed off about Lupercalia? Yeah. But does it have anything to do with St. Valentine? It’s very, very hard to seek out any actual writing that claims that.”
Was St. Valentine an actual person?
The most cited legend is a few priest named Valentine who was executed in third-century Rome for marrying couples against the desire of the pagan Emperor Claudius II. (He also is alleged to have cured the blindness of his jailer’s daughter.) Another St. Valentine, the bishop of Terni, was martyred around the identical time, but little is understood about him.
A pair centuries later, a distinguished family named Valentine can have promoted themselves by exaggerating an ancestor’s story after Christianity had grow to be the prevailing religion, Lenski said.
“They say, ‘Oh, by the best way, we now have this famous ancestor who was a bishop, and he had been persecuted by the emperor for sanctifying marriages,’” he said.
The story prevailed, but the dearth of evidence prompted the Catholic Church in 1969 to remove St. Valentine as the first saint celebrated on Feb. 14. Now, it’s officially the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the missionary brothers who spread the Cyrillic alphabet to Eastern Europe.
What’s love got to do with it?
To further confuse things, there have been many St. Valentines. As many as 50 saints with some variation of the spelling have been recognized by the Catholic Church, said Henry Kelly, a research professor at University of California Los Angeles.
According to Kelly, creator of “Chaucer and the Cult of Saint Valentine,” the English author was the primary to make the connection to like — but he was talking about one other St. Valentine whose feast day was May 3. To commemorate King Richard II’s engagement on that day in 1381, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a love poem.
“He had Italian friends who told him that it was the feast of St. Valentine, the primary bishop of Genoa,” Kelly said. “And so he picked that day because the day on which all of the birds returned to decide on their mates for the yr.”
Chaucer continued writing poems every May that associated love, the rites of spring and St. Valentine. Shakespeare and other poets followed suit. Because the Roman Valentine was essentially the most famous one, people conflated the feast days and now celebrated it in February, Kelly said.
“It was the center of winter, so there weren’t any birds around, there weren’t any flowers around, and in order that they began making up things about Valentine,” he said.
When did it grow to be the Valentine’s Day we recognize today?
By the late 18th century, the tradition had solidified in England and spread to the United States, with people writing poetry and hand-making cards, White Nelson said. Around the 1830s, firms began manufacturing Valentine kits that were assembled from lace paper and cutouts of birds and cupids.
Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates would come a number of many years later, as would the accusations that the vacation was created to sell cards, flowers and candy, White Nelson said. People were complaining in women’s magazines within the late nineteenth century that Valentine’s Day was too industrial.
“Everybody’s all the time expecting Valentine’s Day to die out, and it never does,” she said. “It’s kind of like saying, ‘Coney Island’s too crowded. Nobody goes there anymore.’”
To be fair, not one of the myth-busting historians interviewed for this text resented that a day celebrating love ended up in February. In fact, they said the alternative.
“Winter is infinite,” Kelly said. “The cold is rarely ending, and we’re grateful for something to rejoice over.”
Kelly just gives his wife one other Valentine on May 3.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Albert Stumm lives in Barcelona and writes about travel, food and wellness. Find his work at https://www.albertstumm.com
