A short and slightly bloody history of Valentine’s Day

For the more cynical among us, Valentine’s Day seems like the prototypical “Hallmark holiday.” In some ways, that’s exactly what it is. But this saccharine holiday has a complex, mushy and occasionally violent heritage, starting with St. Valentine himself.

There are several saints named Valentine (at least three), but the one that inspires today’s holiday was probably a priest in Rome at the end of the third century. As several legends go, Emperor Claudius II Gothicus forbade marriage among young, single men. Claudius, known for beating back successive waves of invaders (including the Goths, hence his name), wanted to maintain his pool of recruits.

This is largely apocryphal, as marriage among enlisted Roman soldiers was permitted by Septimius Severus (146-211), the first of the soldier-emperors, said Joel Walker, an assistant professor of history at the UW. Walker said that Severus “changed the policy, since it was widely being ignored anyway.”

But back to the tale.

Valentine, or Valentinus, as the story goes, defied the edict by marrying young men in secret. When his clandestine officiating was discovered, the emperor ordered Valentine’s execution. Another related story claims Valentine helped persecuted Christians escape from Roman prisons.

Either way, the mythic Valentine wasn’t put to death right away, but was imprisoned for a time. He then supposedly fell in love with the jailor’s daughter, and before his death, wrote her a note signed “from your Valentine.” That’s about all we know.

What we do know for sure is that by the Middle Ages, Valentine’s sad story was associated with the celebration of romantic love.

The jump from martyr to card-worthy holiday was the Christianization of the pagan festival of Lupercalia, an ancient Roman fertility celebration dedicated to the Roman god of agriculture, Faunus and the mythical founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

The festival involved the ritual cleansing of homes on the ides of February and the sacrifice of a goat (for fertility) and a dog (for purity) to the aforementioned gods. Boys would cut the goat’s hide into strips and dip them in the blood of the sacrificed animals. They would then go off and slap women and crops with the bloody strips, an act that was welcomed as an omen of increased fertility in the coming year.

The second half of the festival involved putting the names of all the young women of the city in an urn. Local bachelors would then choose from these names at random and pair off with the chosen girl for the year. This was a sort of pre-eHarmony.com version of Internet dating.

Pope Gelasius didn’t think too highly of this pagan-pairing tradition, and outlawed the holiday, replacing it with St. Valentine’s Day in 498 A.D.

By the Middle Ages, this saint’s day was also linked to the popular folk belief that birds pair off in mid-February. To send a “Valentine” was to choose a sweetheart, essentially the same idea we have today.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Geoffrey Chaucer has the unique honor of being among the first to express this concept in English. This occurred in about 1381 in “The Parlement of Foules,” with the line, “For this was on seynt Volantynys day Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make” (sic.).

For the next several centuries, people sent Valentine’s Day greetings to each other, first to lovers, and then to friends and family. By the 1800s and the advent of premade cards, Valentine’s Day notes were further popularized, especially in the United States, where Esther Howland sold the first mass-produced cards in the 1840s.

Howland (1828-1904) was an enterprising businesswoman educated at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. In contrast to the sometimes-bawdy valentines of the period, her cards were tasteful and endearing. According to the American Heritage magazine, a typical line from one of them ran, “May friendship’s constant kiss be thine/From this sweet day of valentine.”

Her business was so successful that it was bought out by the George C. Whitney Company in 1880, which turned her home business into the largest card making operation in the world.

Her cards set the standard for the cards (and the holiday) that we have today. It’s a happy ending to a sad story, and a legacy that both St. Valentine and Howland would probably be proud of.