Who was Saint Valentine?

As you tuck into your chocolate or switch on a romcom this Valentine’s Day, spare a thought for the Saint whose day this is.

Mystery abounds about who exactly this legendary Saint Valentine truly was, and as the sands of time have ensured memories fade, competing stories have emerged. 

The first such story of Saint Valentine relates to a Roman Priest who performed secret marriages against the desires of the Roman Authorities in the 3rd Century CE. For his sins, he was imprisoned in the house of a noble. However, when he healed the noble’s blind daughter, he inspired a mass conversion to Christianity. As you might expect before the deathbed conversion of Emperor Constantine, this Valentine was tortured and decapitated on February 14th. Mere hours before his death, he sent the formerly blind girl a note signed “Your Valentine.”

The second story that emerges during this period is of a Bishop Valentine of Terni, who also performed secret weddings and became a martyr when he was beheaded  on February 14th.

However, many historians raise doubts over whether one or both of these men existed given the similarities in their stories including the way they died. It is possible that they may well have been the same person or elements of one person’s story merged with another’s. 

Further compounding the issue is that Valentine was an incredibly popular name in Post Christ Rome, and there were roughly 50 different stories of saints by that name. Additionally, the earliest stories around Saint Valentine only started to appear during the 6th century CE.

As for Valentine’s Day itself, well even there, there are conflicting accounts.

Some believe that it may have originated as part of a Christian effort to replace the holiday of Lupercalia. Lupercalia, which was celebrated on 15th February, has been painted as a celebration where Roman women wrote their names on clay tablets which men then drew from a jar, pairing up random couples.

However, some accounts state that Lupercalia was rather a festival where two nearly naked young men slapped everyone around them with pieces of goat skin. According to Plutarch some believed that a woman being slapped with this goat skin would assist them in conception and childbirth.

Others believe that the origins of Valentine’s Day go back to the famed English writer Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer wrote a poem called “Parliament of Fowls” that contains the line: “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, when every bird comes there to choose his mate.”

Coming as it did when chivalry and romantic ideals were merging together, Chaucer’s poem created a trend of people writing love poems for their loves and handing these poems to them. 

Thus was Valentine’s Day born.