Valentine’s Day: A History Seeping With Love…and Comparable Confusion

For as long as most have known it, Valentine’s Day is nothing more than an excuse to purchase absorbent volumes of gifts and candy. Despite this commercially surface-level celebration of Valentine's Day, there is much more to the holiday than superficiality. Rather, there exists a rich but convoluted history, brimming with enough love and drama for the most ardent of romantics. 

 

While there is no comprehensive history of Valentine’s Day to truly capture its nature, numerous on-theme tales still shine in significance. The holiday’s namesake, Saint Valentine, is no singular man, but rather many like-named Martyrs. The most prominent rendition tells of a priest serving in Third-Century Rome, when the emperor of the time, Claudius II, outlawed the marriage of young men, believing that unmarried men made better soldiers. Defying this repressive order, Valentine performed marriages in secret until he was discovered, shortly there-after executed and canonized for his devotion to serving the people’s hearts.

Another common legend claims that while in prison, Valentine sent a proclamation of his love--a valentine if you will--in an attempt to swoon his jailor’s daughter, signing the letter “From your Valentine”. Similar to the original tale, the oldest known valentine in existence today was written by Duke Charles of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He had been captured shortly after the Battle of Agincourt which had taken place in October of 1415, one of the later years of the Hundred Years War. At the conclusion of the English victory, Charles had been taken, ultimately resulting in his historical valentine.

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As for the month of February, it is very possible that the Catholic Church chose to Christianize it due to its corresponding Pagan Holiday, Lupercalia. A festival customarily celebrated the 13-15th of February to manifest and revel in fertility, Lupercalia was quickly seen as barbaric and immoral by Catholic missionaries. A typical Lupercalia festival would consist of much animal sacrifice--mostly goat and dog-- and, from a Christian’s eye, grotesque sexual excess. The participants would often smear the sacrificial blood upon themselves and strip, accompanying a procession through the city, seeking and whipping women with the goats’ flesh as a means to promote fertility. Though the day survived at first, much like its celebrators, it was outlawed as being un-Christian, and its traditions eventually fell out. As they faded from the public consciousness, the Pagan rites were quickly forgotten, and Valentine’s Day grew to the celebration of love as we know it today.

 

Regardless of the holiday’s origins, and though there are many more varying accounts, Valentine’s influence on modern pop culture is undeniable. He is esteemed as a sympathetic and romantic individual, and as such, we celebrate his murky legacy. Though now contorted to a superficial and commercially focused holiday, Valentine’s Day continues to hold its initial, foundational values of love, happiness, and romantic sentiment.