Valentine’s Day [is a] holiday (February 14) when lovers express their affection with greetings and gifts. Given their similarities, it has been suggested that the holiday has origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival, which celebrated the coming of spring, included fertility rites and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. At the end of the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I forbid the celebration of Lupercalia and is sometimes attributed with replacing it with St. Valentine’s Day, but the true origin of the holiday is vague at best. Valentine’s Day did not come to be celebrated as a day of romance until about the 14th century. Continue reading from Britannica
Jack B. Oruch, an English professor at the University of Kansas who died in 2013, studied Valentine’s Day as part of his research into the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. He was convinced that Chaucer was the source of our modern ideas about St. Valentine.
In a 1981 academic article, “St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February,” Mr. Oruch argued there was no documented evidence of a romantic tradition linked to St. Valentine before Chaucer wrote the poems “Parlement of Foules” and “The Complaint of Mars” in the late 14th century.
Chaucer may have connected St. Valentine to romance because it was convenient: His saint’s day, on Feb. 14, took place at a time when Britons in the 14th century thought spring began, with birds starting to mate and plants beginning to bloom, Mr. Oruch wrote. Continue reading from The New York Times
Lupercalia [was the] ancient Roman festival that was conducted annually on February 15 under the superintendence of a corporation of priests called Luperci. The origins of the festival are obscure, although the likely derivation of its name from lupus (Latin: “wolf”) has variously suggested connection with an ancient deity who protected herds from wolves and with the legendary she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus. As a fertility rite, the festival is also associated with the god Faunus.
Each Lupercalia began with the sacrifice by the Luperci of goats and a dog, after which two of the Luperci were led to the altar, their foreheads were touched with a bloody knife, and the blood was wiped off with wool dipped in milk; the ritual required that the two young men laugh. The sacrificial feast followed, after which the Luperci cut thongs from the skins of the sacrificial animals and ran in two bands around the Palatine hill, striking with the thongs at any woman who came near them. A blow from the thong was supposed to render a woman fertile. Continue reading from Britannica
