Valentine’s Day has been celebrated a lot longer than many people realize, but it wasn’t until the ideas of courtly love started to spread in the Middle Ages that the holiday become more about flirtations than fertility.
Part of the romance of Valentine’s Day was the belief that the 14th of February was day when birds would pair up. In 1382 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote Parelment of Foules (Parliment of Fowls) for King Richard II to celebrate the king’s engagement to Anne of Bohemia, and he sent it on “Volentynys Day, whan every foul cometh ther to chese (chose) his make (mate).” Valentine’s Day became seen as the perfect time for Medieval lovebirds to bill and coo with one another as well.
Eventually St Valentine, a martyr with scant information about his life, became associated with lovers because his feast day happened to fall on the bird-mating holiday in the middle of February. In time, this obscure saint’s very name became synonymous with courtly romance.
In theory, courtly romance was the mark of esteem all gentle-men owed ladies, and men must mark women as woo-worthy even if they weren’t personally wooing them. This developed into a tradition of giving any randomly selected female acquaintance a Valentine. According to historian Alison Sim, in the way “valentines were chosen by lot from among a group of friends, who then had to buy their valentine a gift,” although “the whole festival was low key, seen mainly as a bit of fun. In the days when marriages were arranged for most people it could scarcely be anything more.”
Although Valentine’s Day wasn’t necessarily a time to find a lover or celebrate romantic love in the Middle Ages, if you were already married (or precontracted)then February 14th was a good time to let your mate know you loved them. Calling a spouse (or future spouse) your Valentine denoted that they made your heart go pitter-pat. When Margery Brews and John Paston became engaged on Valentine’s Day of 1477, the bride-to-be sent her fiancé letters calling him her “right-beloved Valentine” and a “good, true and loving Valentine” because their union was a love match. He wasn’t only a husband … as her Valentine, he was an object of romantic adoration.
I have actually burned a candle (or two) at the shrine of St Valentine while studying in Ireland one summer. In 1835 Pope Gregory XVI gave Father John Spratt, an Irish Carmelite priest, the Reliquary of St Valentine in honor of Spratt’s superlative skills as a preacher. Shortly before Christmas, the stalwart Carmelite received the Reliquary, along with a letter attesting that:
for the greater glory of the omnipotent God and veneration of his saints, we have freely given to the Very Reverend Father Spratt, Master of Sacred Theology of the Order of Calced Carmelites of the convent of that Order at Dublin, in Ireland, the blessed body of St Valentine, martyr, which we ourselves by the command of the most Holy Father Pope Gregory XVI on the 27th day of December 1835, have taken out of the cemetery of St Hippolytus in the Tiburtine Way, together with a small vessel tinged with his blood and have deposited them in a wooden case covered with painted paper, well closed, tied with a red silk ribbon and sealed with our seals and we have so delivered and consigned to him, and we have granted unto him power in the Lord, to the end that he may retain to himself, give to others, transmit beyond the city (Rome) and in any church, oratory or chapel, to expose and place the said blessed holy body for the public veneration of the faithful without, however, an Office and Mass, conformably to the decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, promulgated on the 11th day of August 1691.
Spratt brought the saint’s heart back to his home church — Our Lady of Mount Carmel, located on Whitefriar Street in Dublin. There, the casket holding the precious relics of St Valentine remains to this day, watched over by a life-sized statue of the saint wearing red robes and holding a crocus.
Every 14th of February, “the Reliquary is removed from beneath the side-altar and is placed before the high altar in the church and there venerated at the Masses … there are special sermons and also a short ceremony for the Blessing of Rings for those about to be married.”
I was far from home and missing my husband, so I lit a candle at the altar there at least once a week as a long-distance gesture of romance to my absent spouse. Whatever the ‘true’ story of Saint Valentine, by this time the zeitgeist is swollen with lovers’ vows in his name, so it was romantic. It was also a very beautiful, peaceful church that was a pleasure to sit quietly in and reflect on life. If you are ever in Dublin, I cannot recommend visiting it strongly enough.