On February 14, when we share chocolates, special dinners, or doily st valentine 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. Some accounts say another saint named Valentine during the same period was the Bishop of Terni, also credited with secret weddings and martyrdom via beheading on February 14. Unfortunately for anyone hoping for a tidy, romantic backstory to the holiday, scholars who have studied its origins say there’s very little basis for these accounts. Bruce Forbes, a professor of religious studies at Morningside College in Iowa. Saint Valentine, who according to some sources is actually two distinct historical characters who were said to have healed a child while imprisoned and executed by decapitation. But Forbes said the earliest surviving accounts of the two February 14 Valentines, written starting in the 500s, have a whole lot in common.
The historical evidence is so sketchy that it’s not clear whether the story started with one saint who then became two or if biographers of one man borrowed details from the other—or if either ever existed at all. READ MORE: 6 Facts About St. Perhaps more disappointing for the romantics among us, the early accounts of the two Valentines are typical martyrdom stories, stressing the saints’ miracles and gruesome deaths but containing not a word about romance. Henry Kelly, a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature and history at UCLA. Some modern stories paint Lupercalia as a particularly sexy holiday, when women wrote their names on clay tablets which men then drew from a jar, pairing up random couples.
But, again, early accounts don’t support this. The closest parallel between Lupercalia and modern Valentine’s Day traditions seems to be that the Roman festival involved two nearly naked young men slapping everyone around them with pieces of goat skin. Whatever minor romantic connotations might have been part of Lupercalia, they didn’t translate to the new Christian holiday. The bottom line for me is until Chaucer we have no evidence of people doing something special and romantic on February 14. For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, when every bird comes there to choose his mate. This was a moment in Europe when a particular set of romantic ideas took shape.
Chaucer and other writers of his time celebrated romance between knights and noble ladies who could never marry—often because she was married already—creating tropes of yearning and tragic obstacles that still drive our romantic comedies today. It was only at this point that stories began to appear linking Saint Valentine to romance. But there’s one final twist in the myth of Saint Valentine. When Chaucer wrote of the day when every bird chooses a mate, Kelly argues that he was thinking not of February 14, but of May 3, a day celebrating one of the many other Saint Valentines. After all, England is still awfully cold in mid-February.