Who Was the Real St. Valentine? Myths Behind the Inspiration for Valentine's Day

On February 14, when we share chocolates, special dinners, or doily cards with our loved ones, we do it in the name of Saint Valentine. But who was this saint of romance?

Search the internet, and you can find plenty of stories about him—or them. One Saint Valentine was supposedly a Roman priest who performed secret weddings against the wishes of the authorities in the third century. Imprisoned in the home of a noble, he healed his captor’s blind daughter, causing the whole household to convert to Christianity and sealing his fate. Before being tortured and decapitated on February 14, he sent the girl a note signed “Your Valentine.”

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Some accounts say another saint named Valentine during the same time frame was the Bishop of Terni, also credited with secret weddings and suffering through executing on February 14. 

Lamentably for anybody seeking after a clean, sentimental backstory to the holiday, scholars who have studied its origins say there's almost no basis for these accounts. Truth be told, Valentine's Day just became associated with adoration in the late Middle Ages, thanks to the English artist Geoffrey Chaucer.

"The two stories that everyone talks about, the bishop and the priest, they're so similar that it makes me suspicious," says Bruce Forbes, a professor of religious studies at Morning side College in Iowa. 

Various Martyred Saint Valentines 

Valentine was a well known name in old Rome, and there are in any event 50 stories of various saints by that name. Be that as it may, Forbes said the earliest surviving accounts of the two February 14 Valentines, composed starting during the 500s, share a ton for all intents and purpose. Both were said to have recuperated a kid while imprisoned, prompting a household-wide religious conversion, and they were executed on the same day of the year and covered along the same thruway. 

The historical proof is so sketchy that it's uncertain whether the story started with one saint who at that point got two or if biographers of one man obtained details from the other—or if either ever existed by any means. 

Perhaps all the more disappointing for the romantics among us, the early accounts of the two Valentines are run of the mill suffering stories, stressing the saints' miracles and gruesome deaths however containing not a word about sentiment. 

"They're both legendary in the first place, and the association with affection is considerably increasingly legendary," says Henry Kelly, a scholar of medieval and renaissance writing and history at UCLA. 

Following Valentine's Day to Lupercalia 

Saint Valentine's Day has also been associated with a Christian exertion to supplant the more established holiday of Lupercalia, which Romans celebrated on February 15. Some cutting edge stories paint Lupercalia as an especially sexy holiday, when ladies composed their names on dirt tablets which men at that point drew from a container, matching up irregular couples. 

Be that as it may, once more, early accounts don't support this. The closest equal among Lupercalia and present day Valentine's Day traditions seems to be that the Roman festival included two about stripped youngsters slapping everybody around them with pieces of goat skin. As indicated by the antiquated author Plutarch, some youthful wedded ladies accepted that being hit with the skins advanced origination and easy labor. 

A Chaucer Poem Links Romance to Valentine 

So how did Chaucer make the Valentine's Day we know today? During the 1370s or 1380s, he composed a sonnet called "Parliament of Fowls" that contains this line: "For this was on Saint Valentine's Day, when each winged creature comes there to choose his mate." 

This was a minute in Europe when a specific set of sentimental ideas came to fruition. Chaucer and different writers of his time praised sentiment among knights and honorable ladies who would never wed—frequently because she was hitched as of now—making tropes of longing and heartbreaking obstacles that still drive our lighthearted comedies today. 

By the 1400s, nobles inspired by Chaucer had started composing poems known as "valentines" to their affection interests. It was distinctly now that stories started to show up connecting Saint Valentine to sentiment. 

Be that as it may, there's one last twist in the fantasy of Saint Valentine. At the point when Chaucer composed of the day when each feathered creature chooses a mate, Kelly argues that he was considering not February 14, however of May 3, a day praising one of the numerous other Saint Valentines. All things considered, England is still horrendously cold in mid-February. 

In Kelly's view, Chaucer was searching for an approach to observe King Richard II's assurance to be wedded to Anne of Bohemia on that day and found that was the feast day for Valentine of Genoa. (He could have chosen the Feast of the Holy Cross, however that wouldn't have sounded as decent in the sonnet.) But, since his contemporaries were increasingly acquainted with the Feb. 14 Saint Valentine's Day, that was the date that got joined to the new holiday of sentiment. 

In some ways, that might be something worth being thankful for. 

"February is the worst month in cool climates," Kelly says. "It's extraordinary to have something to anticipate."