Saint who?
The Fulcrum brings you the real history behind this modern-day romantic
NOTHING BRINGS TO mind love and romance like a good, old-fashioned stoning and beheading. Well, maybe not, but that’s what happened to the saint who lends his name to Valentine’s Day. As for what he had to do with love, that’s a bit harder to figure out.
One legend explains that St. Valentine married young lovers in secret after the Roman Emperor Claudius banned marriages in an effort to gain more soldiers for the empire. Another finds the mysterious man, while imprisoned for his faith, curing the blindness of his jailer’s daughter and falling in love with her. In this story, on the night before he died, it is told that our Christian Casanova wrote a note to his lady, signing it “Your Valentine” and thus beginning a long tradition of romantic writing.
However, the more likely origin of Valentine’s Day comes from the Christian appropriation of the Roman holiday Lupercalia, which was celebrated on Feb. 15. The holiday celebrated the goddess of fertility, Juno, and part of the celebration was a draw pairing up young men and women for the duration of the festival. When Christianity emerged as the dominant religion in Europe, officials tried to blend many of the pagan feast days with existent pious holidays. According to this theory, they bumped the day back and assigned it to a saint—St. Valentine.
Sadly, beyond similarity in theme and mode of celebration, there is no definitive record linking Valentine’s Day to Lupercalia. All that’s really known for certain is that in 496 BCE Pope Gelasius decreed Feb. 14 the day of St. Valentine.
Interestingly, the earliest pairing of love tradition and St. Valentine’s Day can be found in Chaucer’s The Parliament of Foules (c. 1381). In the work, which was originally written to celebrate a royal engagement, Chaucer dwells on how the birds come together to find their mates—on Valentine’s Day. However, it was not until the 19th century that the Valentine’s card as we know it made its debut. What began as a tradition of making a card for a lover turned into a serious business venture in 1840 when Esther Holyoke, dubbed the “mother of the valentine,” began to mass produce cards in the United States. From there, it became the corporate love affair it is today.
