part0023

S t Valentine is an icon of romantic love, and his feast day is growing in cultural and commercial importance. But who was Valentine, and what did he have to do with love?

By the fifth century in Rome, the Lupercalia (Chapters 9 and 10), celebrated on the ides of February, had come to replace the spring cleansing ritual of Februa, which had given the month its name. To purify the city and purge it of evil spirits, priests sacrificed a goat and a dog before the image of Lupercus in the Lupercal, the cave in which the she-wolf [Latin, lupa ] is said to have suckled Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome. As part of the festivities, naked noblemen coursed through the streets, whipping willing ladies with strips of goatskin—which, of course, irked the papacy.

In 496 BCE, Pope Gelasius I established a St Valentine's feast day on the 14th of February, most likely in an attempt to Christianize the lewd Lupercalia (Chapters 9 and 10). It is a matter of record that Gelasius had sought to abolish the Lupercalia in the face of opposition from the Senate of Rome, even writing to the senator Andromachus: ‘If you assert that this rite has salutary force, celebrate it yourselves in the ancestral fashion; run nude yourselves that you may properly carry out the mockery.’

But there are, in fact, at least three early saints by the name of Valentinus [Latin, strength]: one was a priest in Rome, the second was a bishop at Terni, and the third was martyred in Africa. Because we don’t know which one Gelasius picked, the Valentine of the feast day could be any, or none, or all, of the three. Indeed, the identity of the historical Valentine is so obscure that, in 1969, the Catholic Church removed him from the General Roman (liturgical) Calendar.

Over time, legends grew around the Valentine of the feast day. According to one legend, he was a priest who fell foul of the Roman emperor Claudius II. In the belief that bachelors make better soldiers, Claudius forbade young men from marrying. But Valentine continued to marry them, and, when challenged, attempted to convert Claudius to Christianity. To punish him for this effrontery, Claudius ordered that he be beaten, stoned, and beheaded. While in prison awaiting his calvary, Valentine fell in love, or made friends, with Julia, the blind daughter of his gaoler Asterius, and sent her secret letters signed ‘from your Valentine’. When Valentine miraculously restored Julia’s sight, Asterius converted to Christianity.

But it is only in the Middle Ages, in the era of courtly love, that the feast of St Valentine came to be linked with romantic love. The earliest evidence of this association is from Parlement of Foules (1382), a poem by Chaucer in honour of the first anniversary of the engagement of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia:

The earliest evidence of a person actually being a valentine is from a rondeau (a mediæval verse form) to his wife from Charles, Duke of Orléans, who had been taken at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) and locked up in the Tower of London:

By the eighteenth century, the giving of gifts and exchanging of cards made of lace and ribbon had become commonplace in England. In the nineteenth century, these customs spread throughout the English-speaking world, and, in the late twentieth, well beyond. Today, lovebirds in America spend around 20 billion dollars a year celebrating Valentine’s Day, which, after Christmas, has grown into the most popular card-sending holiday.

But the truth is that the association of the feast of St Valentine with romantic love has much more to do with the time of year, which is a time of rebirth and fertility, than with any historical Valentine. We may never know who Valentine was, but what we do know for sure is that, whoever he was, he loved God more than any mortal.