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Henrie's Recipes
The Feast of St Valentine
Jocelyn Newmarch
Posted Mon, 30 Jan 2006
How did Valentine’s Day come to be the Day of Romance?
Here’s a quick answer: rampant, lustful Latin lovers who couldn’t control their hormones invented the international feast of luurve. Yes, we can blame the Italians for this one.
As you might know, February 14 is the feast of St Valentine, but precisely which St Valentine we’re celebrating isn’t entirely clear. As Valentine was a popular name in medieval times, being derived from the Latin for valour, the Church recognises around fifty Valentines as saints.
Cynics might like to know that one of these St Valentines is also the patron saint of epilepsy sufferers. Perhaps love really is an illness?
However after exhaustive research scholars have narrowed the field down to two possible candidates, all of whom lived in Rome.
Candidate One:
Martyred some time around 275 AD, Valentine was a Christian priest who defied an imperial edict against wartime marriages. The emperor of the
time, Claudius the Cruel, felt that unmarried men would make more willing soldiers, but Valentine secretly heard couples’ marriage vows.
Thus we find the true origins of the slogan “Make love not war”.
Candidate Two:
Another Valentine was a Christian in ancient Rome, when the Church was still regarded as an undesirable cult from the Middle East. This Valentine was imprisoned for helping other Christians, and while in his cell he was said to have performed miracles of healing. He became friendly with Julia, the jailer’s daughter, whom he also cured of blindness. On the morning of his execution, the legend continues, he sent the girl a note signed, “From your Valentine”.
Whoever he was, his name is a synonym for romantic love. Could anyone have a better legacy?
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On the other hand, this may have been a strategic move on the part of the Pope, as the saint’s feast conveniently coincides with some interesting Roman fertility rites...
Traditionally, February 14 was dedicated to the goddess Juno — Jupiter’s wife, and also the goddess of marriage, women and childbirth. To honour the deity, the Romans placed the names of nubile young women in a large vase. These names would then be drawn at random by the city’s eligible bachelors, and the two would pair up sexually for the year. The couplings frequently resulted in marriage and a pleasing increase in the Roman population, so everyone was kept happy by this arrangement.
The following day, February 15, was the feast of Lupercalia, which was associated with both purification and fertility. Romans believed that their city had been founded by twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, who in infancy were suckled by a she-wolf. Lupercalia honoured these two as well as the fertility god Faunus, and was one of the most important occasions of the year.
Early in the morning, the priests of the Luperci would meet at a sacred cave to sacrifice a dog (representing purification) and a goat (for fertility). Two young boys, nearly naked and smeared with the sacrificial blood, would run through the city streets whipping the devout with a strip of goatskin. As fun as this must have been, it had a serious purpose too as a powerful fertility charm. Women hoping to bear children would allow themselves to be whipped, for the rite was said to be able to make even a barren woman conceive.
Gelasius understandably didn’t approve of these goings-on, and so replaced the lustful lottery with one meant to encourage spiritual development. (Lupercalia was probably banned outright). Instead of drawing women’s names, people drew the names of saints. Both men and women could take part, and everyone was supposed to try and emulate their chosen saint’s qualities for the year.
This modification didn’t go down to well with his congregation, and Roman men continued to woo their sweethearts on this day — often, apparently, with handwritten love letters bearing Valentine’s name. Thus the day’s association with romance continued well into the Middle Ages.
During the medieval Age of Chivalry, the old lottery was revived in England. English couples were selected by drawing names out of a box and the woman would become the man’s valentine for the year. Her name would be sewn onto his sleeve and it would be his duty to attend and protect her, giving rise to the expression, “wearing his heart on his sleeve”.
In France and England, it was believed that February 14 was the day when birds chose their mates, a belief which was popularised, but not invented by, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. This became another reason for lovers to mark the day.
Another tradition was begun by a French princess, the daughter of Henry IV, who once threw a party in honour of St Valentine. Each lady present received a bouquet of flowers from her gallant valentine.
But the oldest surviving valentine we know of dates from the fifteenth century and is on display in the British Library. Charles, Duke of Orleans, captured after the Battle of Agincourt, sent his wife a love poem from the Tower of London in 1415.
The English King Henry V thought this was a good idea and a few years later he hired a writer, John Lydgate, to send a valentine note to the eminently desirable Catherine of Valois.
Valentine’s Day really become popular with ordinary and upper-class people in the seventeenth century among the stiff-upper-lip English, and became mass-produced as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Economics helped here too — cheaper postage rates meant it didn’t cost much to send greetings.
However, for the Hallmark-isation of the holiday we have to blame an American entrepeneur, Esther A Howland, who in the 1840s started selling mass-produced cards from her shop. Howland’s idea really took off: Americans now send a billion cards every year for Valentine’s Day.
