Won’t You Be My Valentine?
The origins of Valentine’s Day date back to ancient Rome and the fertility feast of Lupercalia. From February 13th through 15th, Roman men sacrificed goats and used their skins to whip women under the assumption that this would make them fertile (sounds like a party I wouldn’t want to attend!). At the end of the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I ‘Christianized’ the pagan festival, declaring February 14 as Valentine’s Day in honor of one or both Saints named Valentine: Valentine of Terni (197AD) and Valentine of Rome (496AD). In 1382, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote Parlement of Foules:
“For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery foul comyth there to chese his make.”
It is uncertain if Chaucer was referring to February 14th or to the feast of St Valentine of Genoa, which falls in May. In the fifteenth century, the French celebrated on February 14th with a romantic feast of love. Lavish banquets with singing and dancing were held to mark the occasion. It was also a 15th-century Frenchman who committed the earliest surviving Valentine’s greeting to paper. While imprisoned in the Tower of London following the 1415 battle of Agincourt, the Duke of Orleans wrote to his wife:
“Je suis desja d’amour tanné
Ma tres doulce Valentinée”
(I am already sick of love,
my very gentle Valentine)
And let’s not forget one of my all-time favorites, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when Ophelia says:
To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
(And by the way, I played Ophelia a long time ago when I was a teenager and into theater.)