A History of Valentine’s Day

The modern Valentine’s Day is a romantic holiday, occuring on February 14th every year. Gifts, flowers, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, and romantic outings rake in about 14 billion dollars annually. Widely celebrated as a secular expression of love, it is also associated with early church history and further back to pagan Roman history.

A festival called Lupercalia was celebrated from February 13th through the 15th to celebrate fertility. One of its rituals was somewhat gruesome, involving the ritual sacrifice of animals. The bloody skins would then be used to slap young women in order to bless them with fertility. The female deity associated with Lupercalia is Lupa, the she-wolf who nursed infamous brothers Romulus and Remus. The male deity honored by this festival was called Fawnus, god of fertility. But Valentine’s day has its connection to the Roman Catholic Church as well.

Some believe that in an effort to absorb the pagan holida, Pope Gelasius declared February 14th to be Saint Valentine’s day and abolished the festival of Lupercalia. There were actually several honored priests cannonized as Saint Valentine, but one in particular is credited with his contributions to some of our modern Valentine’s Day traditions.

In the third century AD, under Emperor Claudius II, there lived a priest named Valentine who defied the Emperor’s banning of marriages. Soldiers on long campaigns for the Emperor suffered homesickness and Claudius II instituted the ban for fear that love of wives and families was weakening his armies. Father Valentine married couples in secret because he disagreed with the ban. Father Valentine was eventually found out, arrested and sentenced to death. Couples he had married were reported to have slipped him flowers and notes through the bars of his cell. The story goes that while Father Valentine was in jail, he fell in love with one of the daughters of his jailor and had sent her a note on the day he was executed, February 14th, which was signed, “From Your Valentine.”

But this story about a Saint Valentine was not the first Saint named Valentine to be honored on that date. There were two others, one who was martyred in 269 AD and another who actually became a Bishop. Neither one of their stories involved romantic love.

Many historians claim that the first association of Valentine’s day with romantic love appeared in 1382 in a work by Geoffrey Chaucer titled, Parlement de Foules, which commemorated the marriage treaty between King Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia.

The origins of our modern day Valentine’s Day cards come from the British printing presses of 1797, which began issuing pre-written declarations of love for young men who could not find the words with which to entice the objects of their affection. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that the cards began to be accompanied by gifts such as flowers and chocolates.