YOU’VE BEEN LIED TO about the origins of St Valentine’s Day and its customs. You’ve probably been told that it’s based on the life and acts of an ancient saint called Valentine who is the patron saint of love and who died on 14 February. Maybe you’ve even heard that it’s connected to the Lupercalia festival celebrated during Roman times. The real history of St Valentine is nowhere near as fun, charming, or clearcut however. Instead, the reasons we celebrate St Valentine’s Day with expressions of love and devotion are much more recent and have a lot to do with the English author, Geoffrey Chaucer. In this Valentine’s Day documentary from History Calling I look at the real history of Valentine’s Day, at why you shouldn’t believe all you read about this holiday and at some Valentine’s Day traditions and how far back they can really be traced.
We’ll ask, ‘who was St Valentine?’ and examine two men, one of them the Bishop of Terni, thought to be the original man and what we actually know about them. This involves two separate but similar stories of a man performing healing miracles on crippled children during the later third century and converting their families along the way. In both cases, having then refused to renounce his faith, Valentine was executed, supposedly on the orders of an Emperor Claudius, and was possibly buried outside the Flaminian Gate of Rome. In these stories he has nothing to do with love and although there was a cult of St Valentine as early as the fourth century, when Pope Julius I built a basilica in his name, he was not associated with romance for many more centuries to come. Instead that correlation only began to appear with Chaucer and only really took off in the seventeenth century. I’ll also explain why Lupercalia has nothing to do with the saint’s day and some of the many places where St Valentine’s bones are said to be kept.
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