Parliament of... What, Exactly?

This year's relatively late start to Lent has given us a blessed reprieve from a certain category of Catholic take, namely, what to do when a holiday associated with romance and chocolate conflicts with the Church's annual call to fasting and penitence. The resulting unabashed embrace of Valentines Day, however, has only increased an annual thorn in my side. As your friendly online historian of medieval Catholicism, I am here to beg you to please, for the love, stop sharing ahistorical stories about St. Valentine, before I have an aneurysm.

If you haven't noticed this trend, here's the summary: in the middle of the third century AD, the emperor outlawed marriage for fear that ties to home and family would make young men unfit soldiers. Bishop Valentine, however, defied this order and married Christian couples anyway. This is how it is told in my son's weekly planner, and he's so puzzled by the story he has asked us to read it twice. I've seen it repeated in memes, comics, crafts, blogs, and religious education websites.

I can't emphasize this enough: almost none of the above is true.

Well, maybe that was enough. Nevertheless, I want to sit with the story a while, as the association of St. Valentine and romantic love is a more interesting historical puzzle than this story might lead you to believe. Working this out also led me to discover a whole new saint for my family to, er, love. (Even if he was, like St. Christopher, removed from the General Roman Calendar in 1969.)

So. Why does the above story of St. Valentine fail, at first glance, a 'sniff test' for historicity?

First, it doesn't match what we know of the Romans' views of marriage. Marriage, rather, was an essential civic institution. Indeed, we can compare the many (often also somewhat fantastic) stories of martyrs that depict institutional panic as women chose lives of virginity, prayer, and charity over marriages that kept them (and, in Roman views, society at large) under control. We also know that Romans were concerned about their demographics and birth rates. It's extremely unlikely that a Roman emperor would outlaw marriage across the board.

Somewhat more plausible versions of this story say that it was only Roman soldiers who were forbidden to marry. This is, in fact, true-- at least, until the time of Septimus Severus, who died in 211. By the later 200s, however, when the St. Valentine story is set, the ban seems to have ended. In addition, by this time the Roman military was almost entirely made up of recruits from the hinterlands of the empire; the young Roman men over whose weddings St. Valentine would have presided would never have made up an essential part of the Roman forces.

This story also doesn't match what we know about marriage in the early centuries of the Church, when marriage was still essentially an institution of the state. Christians differed from their neighbors in their belief that their marriages were indissoluble, but they did not require (or perhaps, in this era, even comprehend the idea of) the blessing of a cleric for a marriage. Arguments that a priests' presence was required for a valid wedding do not appear in the west until the ninth century, and we aren't even sure there was any kind of nuptial liturgy before the fourth century.

Now, many stories of Roman martyrs have been embelleshed over the years, but this story about St. Valentine seems to be exceptionally recent. No medieval story about Valentine refers to clandestine marriages, and its origins remain unclear (at least to me). It likely developed at some point in the 20th century; there is no reference to it in the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia, whose entry on St. Valentine ends, "the custom of choosing and sending valentines has of late years fallen into comparative desuitude".

However, this late addition to the cult of St. Valentine did not establish a tradition -- rather, it is an attempt to explain a phenomenon, namely, the association of St. Valentine's day with romantic love.

As David Hugh Farmer writes in The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, “the connection of lovers with St. Valentine, with all its consequences for the printing and retailing industries, is one of the less likely results of the cult of the Roman martyrs.”

 

How, then, did we get here?

 

For one last time, let’s touch on something that we know Valentine’s Day isn’t: a continuation of Lupercalia, which was claimed by Alban Butler (d. 1773), author of Butler’s Lives of the Saints. While Lupercalia took place around the same time of year, it wasn’t a terribly popular holiday by the time in which it would have been taken over, and there’s no evidence that it involved a choosing of romantic partners, with lots or otherwise.

 

In fact, although the numerous saints named Valentine were popular throughout the middle ages, there is no association of Valentine’s Day with love or romance until the fourteenth century—certainly not a time when people were concerned with superceding Lupercalia. Did I promise you a story more interesting than overbearing Roman decrees and secret weddings? Well, what could be more interesting than Geoffrey Chaucer and the vagaries of the medieval calendar?

In fact, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles is our first witness for a connection between Valentine and romance. Earlier medieval legends and dramas of Valentine make no reference to it (not even the Golden Legend, which gives him a rather cursory treatment.) Chaucer gives St. Valentine’s day as the spring day when birds gather to choose their mates. A number of his literary friends appear to have picked up this association of mating birds and February 14th, and by the time he died in 1400, the association began to spread, with great popularity among the French court. Charles d’Orléans wrote a number of Valentine poems while imprisoned after Agincourt, and may well have developed a court game of choosing “Valentines” to imitate Chaucer’s fowles, further spreading a tradition of writing Valentines poems. The letters of the English Paston family, which offer us a detailed record of family life in 15th-century England, also contain two letters in which a young woman writes to her would-be husband, referring to him as her “valentine”.

Why did Chaucer choose St. Valentine? Isn’t February 14th a little early for birds to be pairing? (Snow is currently flying outside my window, here in North America.) This is a common critique, but in fact there were numerous ways of dividing the seasons in use throughout the middle ages, dependent on both the zodiac and the equinox. Greek and Roman custom began spring and fall not at their equinox, as we do, but at the point between the solstice and the equinox—roughly February 2nd. Ptolemy said spring began when the sun entered Pisces, which would occur around February 15th.(Somewhat earlier by the 1400s). At this point, warm winds arrived in the Mediterranean, and Spring began. Another system, found in Isidore of Seville, gave February 22nd, the feast of the Chair of Peter, the honor of marking springtime. If Chaucer chose February for the start of spring, he was hardly alone—and indeed, by February 22nd not all signs of spring would be so far off.

Medievalist Jack B. Oruch has argued that Chaucer’s subsequent choice of St. Valentine’s day is a combination of happenstance and poetic skill. Valentine was a popular and attractive name, well-suited for meter, which corresponded with the period in which spring might be starting. In addition, Oruch argues, the uncertain nature of February weather is no accident for Chaucer’s poetry—rather, the fickle weather is meant to suggest the tempestuous nature of these poetic romances. And thus, from a confluence of Roman calendar, the martyrology, and an English poet, we get our Valentine, patron of lovers.
 

Who was Valentine before Chaucer? In fact there were two martyred Valentines, both apparently killed in the middle of the third century and both commemorated on February 14th, likely because the cult of one attached itself to another. Valentine of Rome, a priest, was said to have come close to converting the Emperor to Christianity; he was then put under house arrest, where he cured the young daughter of his guard of her blindness; after the members of the household were converted, he was martyred. Some online stories will tell you that he wrote this girl a note that he signed, “your Valentine,” but I hope at this point you can recognize that accretion for what it is.

 

The second, more popular medieval Valentine was Bishop Valentine of Terni, who was asked to heal the young son of a philosopher who was plagued by an illness that regularly convulsed him with his head between his legs, and which took his ability to talk. Valentine told the father that the cure would depend on faith; the subsequent healing and conversions garnered the attention of authorities, and he was, likewise, martyred. Archaeological material shows evidence of devotion to both of these Valentines in early medieval Rome, and the cult of Bishop Valentine spread throughout Europe, especially in Germany, where he was a patron saint of epilepsy. As the mother of a child with an epileptic disorder, you will understand why this story took my heart.

 

(Sorry.)

 

It’s tempting to say that these stories don’t matter. We want, after all, to teach people that marriage is important, and it makes a nice story. Let’s not fall into that, however. Christianity is a faith that makes a historical claim—that God became man and lived with humanity, in a specific culture and empire and year. We don’t need to rely on bad history to teach a lesson, nor do we want to undermine our historical claims by ignoring what we can say. Not every historical question will have a tidy answer of cause and effect. The story of St. Valentine and love, however, gives us a picture of a world in which the saints offered a sanctification of the calendar itself, marking the seasons and the days—even days given over to the most secular of pleasures.

(Some sources I used in putting together this TinyLetter include Jack B. Oruch, “St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February,” Speculum 56:3 (July 1981), 534-564;Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western  Church, Brill, 1994; Brian Campbell, “The Marriage of Soldiers under the Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 68:1978, 153-166.