Was Saint Valentine real? The murky history of Valentine's Day

Valentine’s Day is a day for flowers, cards and chocolate, but the history of the lover’s holiday may be much darker. 

There are multiple theories about the origin of Valentine’s Day, from drunken debauchery to a feast of St. Valentine. Here are some of them: 

History of Valentine’s Day

The backstory:

For many years, historians said the holiday was linked to an ancient Roman festival called Lupercalia that fell in mid-February. Noel Lenski, a Yale University historian, told The Associated Press that there are clear connections between Lupercalia and modern Valentine’s Day.

Both are erotic festivals, in a sense, but the ancient one — which included pairing off women and men by lottery — also involved religious purification and atonement.

What they're saying:

"Naked young men, drunk, would go running around Palatine Hill swatting virginal women with strips of dog fur and goat fur to make them fertile," Lenski explained. 

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One theory is that Pope Gelasius wanted to put an end to the debauchery in the late fifth century. He declared Feb. 14 as the feast day of St. Valentine, who had been martyred about 200 years before. But is it true? 

The other side:

Elizabeth White Nelson, a University of Nevada Las Vegas history professor, said that theory emerged in an 1807 book without any evidence.

"People who think that’s the story haven’t read the letter that he actually wrote about Lupercalia," she said, referring to the pope. "Is he pissed off about Lupercalia? Yeah. But does it have anything to do with St. Valentine? It’s very, very hard to find any actual writing that says that."

Was St. Valentine real? 

Dig deeper:

The most popular legend is about a priest named Valentine who was executed in third-century Rome for marrying couples against the will of the pagan Emperor Claudius II. (He also is said to have cured the blindness of his jailer’s daughter.) Another St. Valentine, the bishop of Terni, was martyred around the same time, but little is known about him.

A couple hundred years later, a prominent family named Valentine may have promoted themselves by exaggerating an ancestor’s story after Christianity had become the prevailing religion.

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The story prevailed, but the lack of evidence prompted the Catholic Church in 1969 to remove St. Valentine as the primary saint celebrated on Feb. 14. Now, it’s officially the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the missionary brothers who spread the Cyrillic alphabet to Eastern Europe.

To further confuse things, there were many St. Valentines. As many as 50 saints with some variation of the spelling have been recognized by the Catholic Church.

Geoffrey Chaucer and Valentine’s Day

Historians say English writer Geoffry Chaucer was the first to make the connection to love — but he was talking about another St. Valentine whose feast day was May 3. Chaucer wrote a love poem to honor King Richard II’s engagement on that day in 1381.

Chaucer continued writing poems every May that associated love, the rites of spring and St. Valentine. Shakespeare and other poets followed suit. Because the Roman Valentine was the most famous one, people conflated the feast days and now celebrated it in February.

"It was the middle of winter, so there weren’t any birds around, there weren’t any flowers around, and so they started making up things about Valentine," Henry Kelly, a research professor at University of California Los Angeles, said. 

Valentine’s Day evolves

By the late 18th century, the tradition had been popularized in England and spread to the United States, with people writing poetry and hand-making cards. Around the 1830s, companies began manufacturing Valentine kits that were assembled from lace paper and cutouts of birds and cupids.

Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates would come a few decades later. By the late 19th century, people were complaining in women’s magazines that Valentine’s Day was too commercial, but it hasn’t stopped people from celebrating love with their wallets.