Valentine's Day is a cultural and commercial phenomenon. Flowers go up in price, restaurants are booked to capacity, and everyone is expected to express love. There are heart-shaped stoplights, cheesy renditions of Cupid stuck on display windows, and even full blown V-Day parties thrown to commemorate the date. But what if we told you that the real Valentine's Day involved a pagan ritual, a poet from the middle ages, and a beheading?
The first thing you should know is that there is actually a saint named Valentine. Actually there could be as many as eleven Saint Valentines. (Valentine, coming from the Latin word valens, meaning strong or influential, was apparently a pretty common name back in those days.) One of them (or possibly three, but we won't get into that) is said to be connected to February 14.
So who is Saint Valentine? Very little is known about him—so little that the Roman Catholic Church has decided to remove him from their calendar of feast days (though they still recognize him as a saint). There are conflicting stories about him but here's what we gathered: St. Valentine was the Bishop of Terni, a city in Italy, in the 3rd century. It is said that he officiated weddings of soldiers against the wishes of Emperor Claudius (Claudius believed that unmarried soldiers perform better in battle because they don't have to think about their wives or children). For this, he was imprisoned. His judge (or his jailer in other accounts) had a blind daughter that he miraculously healed. Legend has it that on the day of his execution, he left a letter to this same girl signed as, "your Valentine." Eventually, St. Valentine was sentenced to death and beheaded in the year 269 thereabouts.
St_Valentine Baptizing St. Lucilla by Jacopo da Ponte, circa 1575
It wasn't until the year 469 when the feast day of St. Valentine was instituted on February 14, supposedly to replace a pagan festival of love and fertility called Lupercalia (which involved animal sacrifice and fertility whipping). But how did we get from the death of a bishop to a day celebrating couples and romantic love? Enter Geoffrey Chaucer, an English poet and author famous for writing The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer has the distinction of having written the oldest known reference to St. Valentine's Day as a day of romance. In his poem, "The Parliament of Fowls", he wrote about birds choosing their mates on the said feast day. It is highly debatable if Chaucer was the first and deserves the credit for making this connection. For all we know Chaucer chose St. Valentine's day arbitrarily or as a commentary on something else entirely. But what we can infer is that it was references like this that built and reinforced the notion of Valentine's Day being what it is today.
So the next time you're feeling all lovey dovey on the 14th, remember that the real Valentine's Day is not what you think it is.