The History of Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is here! Maybe you’re celebrating with a loved one, beginning a new relationship, or just treating it like another Monday, you can’t ignore the fact that today is a holiday celebrated by many. But where did Valentine’s Day come from? Here’s a look at the history of the day devoted to love.

Much of the story surrounding Valentine’s Day and St. Valentine himself is lost, but we do know that the day combines both Christian and old Roman traditions. Getting to the heart (pardon the pun) of the Christian story of St. Valentine, however, is made difficult by the fact that there are three St. Valentine’s on the official list of martyred saints.

One of these stories follows a priest who lived in Rome during the third century. Emperor Claudius II, the ruler at the time, decided that single men would make better soldiers than married men because they would have no families to return to. Thus, he thought it would be a great idea to outlaw marriage for men under a certain age. Valentine, however, saw the injustice of this and went ahead and married young couples in secret. When this was discovered, Claudius had him executed.

Another legend concerns Valentine (perhaps not a priest?) and a young girl. Valentine was serving a prison sentence when he met a young girl, perhaps the daughter of his jailor. He fell in love with her, and before his death, he sent her a short letter signed “from your Valentine.” This means that St. Valentine might have sent the very first valentine card himself.

On the pagan, Roman side of things, the middle of February was celebrated as a festival called Lupercalia. This fertility festival was decided to Faunus, the god of agriculture, and to Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. It involved greeting the coming spring by ritually cleaning houses and performing a number of purification rituals. One part of the ritual involved slapping women with strips made from a goat’s hide in an effort to make them more fertile!

However, another part of the festival is closer to our traditional Valentine’s Day. The young women of the town would all place their names in a giant urn, and then the young men would draw out a name (kind of like getting a mystery Valentine). The two were then paired up for a year, and many times, these pairing led to marriage. Pope Gelasius later declared February 14 as St. Valentine’s Day as a way of Christianizing these rituals. Shortly thereafter, the church outlawed the lottery system of pairing up, although that didn’t stop couples from getting together on Valentine’s Day.

It wasn’t until the Middle Ages, though, that people really started spreading the romance on Valentine’s Day. Many say that it was Charles, the Duke of Orleans, who sent the first valentine to his wife in 1415. Following the Battle of Agincourt, the duke was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and wanted to reassure his wife that he was still alive. A few years later, King Henry V send a valentine to Catherine of Valois, although the king hired someone to write it for him (probably not a good idea!).

In the U.K., people continued to exchange gifts or notes on Valentine’s Day, and towards the end of the eighteenth century, printed cards began to appear. These Valentine’s Day traditions came to the U.S. in the 1700s, where they were virtually unchanged. During the 1840s, a woman named Esther A. Howland created the first mass-produced valentines, cementing the holiday in place. Today, more than a billion cards are sent on Valentine’s Day. Will you send a valentine this year?