Happy St. Valentine’s Day!
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All right, I’m sentimental. I look forward to St. Valentine’s Day, to flowers, candy and fancy cards. I recall third grade in the 1950s, buying a sack of Valentine’s Day cards, writing on each one, slipping them into the girls’ desks and wondering how many girls would slip a card into mine. Would I get a Valentine from her?
In seventh grade, I bought her a big card with lace boarders and a heart-shaped box of candy with a doll on top. My proclamation of undying love—sent anonymously.
Just who is St. Valentine, festooned with red hearts, cupids and flowers, St. Valentine who stirs such ardor and passionate longing in young hearts?
No one really knows, for sure. The name was quite common in the first centuries of the church, deriving from the Latin, valens (“worthy,” “strong” or “powerful”). At least fourteen Valentines were martyred prior to the Edict of Milan (A.D. 313). In 496 Pope Gelasius I established the Feast of St. Valentine on February 14, but little was known of him even then; he is identified variously as a priest of Rome, a bishop or a martyr in the Roman province of Africa. The most well-known story about St. Valentine appears much later in Jacobus de Voragine’s compilation, Legenda Aurea (1260), in which St. Valentine refuses to deny Christ before the emperor Claudius II (268-270). The Legenda Aurea makes no link between St. Valentine and romantic love, so on-going legend embellishes the tale, suggesting (wrongly) that Claudius ordered young men not to marry, since unmarried men made better soldiers. Because Valentine married young Christian lovers covertly, so the story goes, he incurred the wrath of Claudius and brought about his own martyrdom. The legend even goes on to say that Valentine fell in love with his jailer’s daughter and before his execution wrote her a farewell, signing it: “from your Valentine”—the first Valentine’s Day card!
In fact, no recorded link between St. Valentine and romantic love occurs before Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Fowls” (1382), written on the occasion of Richard II of England’s engagement to Anne of Bohemia on May 2, 1381. In the opening stanza, the poet declares himself inexperienced in the ways of love: “I knowe nat Love in dede” (line 8). But he goes on to say that he has read much about love. Quite recently, he says, he had been reading Somnium Scipionis, in which the elder Africanus appears to young Scipio in a dream, giving him a heavenly vision of eternity. As he was reading, our poet continues, he fell asleep and Africanus himself appeared to him, revealing in a dream the Temple of Venus where all the birds assembled before Venus, “For this was on seynt Valentynes day/Whan every foul cometh there to chese his mate” (lines 309-310). The poem moves forward in the best traditions of courtly love as the birds choose their mates and fly away.
Most readers of “The Parliament of Fowls” casually assume that Chaucer refers to February 14th as St. Valentine’s Day, when in fact Richard and Anne’s engagement occurred on May 2nd. This prompted my colleague, Henry Ansgar Kelly, former Director of UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, to write Chaucer and the Cult of Saint Valentine (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1997), concluding that February 14 is far too early for birds to mate in England and that Chaucer must have been referring to St. Valentine, bishop of Genoa, who died around A.D. 307 and whose feast day is May 2nd. If he is correct, we have been celebrating St. Valentine’s Day on the wrong date all these years!
Given the uncertainty of who St. Valentine really is, the Roman Catholic Church removed him from the Calendar of Saints in its post-Vatican II revision of Calendarium Romanum (Libreria Editrice Vatican, 1969). Poor old St. Valentine went the way of St. Christopher and so many others who lived largely in legend and folklore.
Nonetheless, St. Valentine’s Day remains an enormously popular holiday: florists deliver more flowers on Valentine’s Day than any other day of the year (32% of their annual sales), and over one billion Valentine’s Day cards will change hands today.
All in all, Valentine’s Day is a lovely holiday—for lovebirds of every age. Enjoy!