“This morning
come up to my wife’s bedside, I being up dressing myself, little Will Mercer to
be her Valentine; and brought her name writ upon blue paper in gold letters,
done by himself, very pretty; and we were both well pleased with it. But I am
also this year my wife’s Valentine, and it will cost me £5; but that I must
have laid out if we had not been Valentines.”
—Samuel Pepys diary entry
14
February 1667
If you bemoan the commercialization
of Valentine’s Day and the sense of obligation to buy a gift for your
sweetheart, and assume that this is another one of those 20th century
introductions, think again. By the 17th century, English upper class men were
expected to not only buy gifts for their wives, but also for another woman they
knew, whose name they drew, apparently not unlike the way people today draw
names for exchanging gifts at Christmas.
And, as Pepys’s diary entry
indicates, children were involved in the exchange early on as well, such as
little Will with his homemade Valentine.
By the 17th century, the
observation of Valentine’s Day was thriving in English popular culture, with
the wealthier classes buying increasingly elaborate gifts according to their
income level, and the peasants drawing names for the purpose of partying
together, with some mind to the possibility that this year’s Valentine could
eventually become one’s spouse. Clergyman Henry Bourne disapprovingly described
the practice in 1725:
“It is a ceremony, never omitted
among the [lower classes], to draw lots, which they term Valentines, on the eve before Valentine-day. ... Everyone draws a
name, which ... is called their Valentine,
and is also look’d upon as a good omen of their being man and wife
afterwards.” (Quoted in Schmidt, see source below.)
After Chaucer and the Valentine
poets who followed him in the 15th century, the church increasingly lost control
of its saint, as his role changed from that of an intermediary between men and
God to that of ambassador between men and women. Humanities prof. Leigh Eric
Schmidt writes, “Some ambitious interpreters tried to salvage the church’s
martyr by merging him with the lover’s saint,” and dates the emergence of
stories that are familiar today, about performing illegal marriages or writing
affectionate letters to his jail keeper’s daughter, to the 18th century.
It’s the aristrocracy we have to
blame for the consumerist spin that has overtaken the holiday. Not only did
they have the means to make the exchange of Valentine gifts common practice,
but they were also literate, though not always as talented as their forebears,
the likes of Chaucer, Lydgate, and d’Orléans, who are credited with first promulgating
the Valentine poetry tradition.
The obligation to praise one’s
Valentine in verse form eventually led to what Schmidt describes as “the wider
circulation of greetings, love poems, and doggerel on St. Valentine’s Day.”
But we can thank the classes who
couldn’t afford to give each other gifts and didn’t know how to write insipid
verse for interjecting the more playful and romantic aspects of the holiday,
what Schmidt describes as “a day of matchmaking and conviviality.”
“Although not wholly shorn of
his religious roots, St. Valentine flourished in both court and countryside as
a patron of sociability and pairing games. Popular customs of drawing lots,
fortune-telling, drinking, and doling coexisted with elite traditions of
courtly poetry and gift giving,” he writes.
We may no longer associate St.
Valentine with pious religious acts or the sufferings of a Christian martyr,
but how many of the other dozen or so saints whose days once appeared on the
February calendar do you see commemorated there today?
• • • • • • •
Sources
Schmidt,
Leigh Eric. “The Fashioning of a Modern Holiday: St. Valentine’s Day,
1840-1870.” Winterthur Portfolio. Vol.
28, No. 4 (winter 1993). pp. 209-245. Univ. of Chicago Press. (Accessed fromJSTOR database via Hennepin County Library online.)
thanks
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