14 Things about Valentine’s Day, No. 7: A Poetic English Monk and a French Duke with Time on his Hands

Charles d'Orléans, penning a Valentine while being held captive in England

“At the time of Chaucer’s death in 1400, the transformation of [Saint] Valentine into an auxiliary or parallel to Cupid as sponsor of lovers was well under way,” wrote Prof. Oruch in his article on Chaucer and Valentine’s Day that I have cited in several previous posts (see source below).

And so it is that references to Valentine in love poems begin to show up in works penned after Chaucer’s A Parlement of Foules, which Oruch has argued (convincingly) is the first work on record to associate the saint with lovers.

Soon people in England and France were referring to the objects of their affection as their Valentines, and this term was applied as much in a friendly and playful way as it was to mean one’s lover.

It was the poet-monk John Lydgate (ca. 1370–ca. 1450), a great admirer of Chaucer, who appears to be the first one to use the word Valentine for this type of poem, postulates Oruch, in the work A Valentine to Her that Excelleth All, a tribute to the Virgin Mary.

Later, when Lydgate published a series of poems based on the calendar and the various saints honored therein, he again employed the word Valentine to express his admiration for them, ending with “I choose all saints to my Valentine.”

Another Valentine influencer was Charles, the Duke of Orléans, who spent 24 years as a prisoner of war in Engand, after the Battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415. He made the best of his captivity by writing poetry. In reality, he wasn’t exactly languishing in the Tower, but rather was the “guest” of various English noblemen. He wrote poems in French and also in English, in both the ballade and rondeau forms, and his English poetry was apparently quite sophisticated, described as fitting somewhere between the medieval and Renaissance style (according to Wikipedia).

Several of Orléans’ works were Valentine poems, both in English and French, and, according to Oruch, one of the rondeaux in particular stands out as the first reference to some sort of Valentine’s Day lottery, or drawing of names to match up Valentines. This was not a salacious pairing; Orléans was a prisoner in England and his Valentine in this case was his sister-in-law, the Duchess of Rohan in France. This was more reflective of the courtly love tradition that started in medieval France, all about praising the virtues of some noblewoman. (I’m not saying that nothing untoward ever took place in that tradition, but it wasn’t ostensibly about hanky panky.)

Orléans must have had plenty of time on his hands during his 24 years in England, and Oruch thinks he was probably the first person to take such an interest in Valentine poetry, and influential enough “to make life imitate art.”

As a high-born and well-connected French nobleman—and did I mention he had lots of idle time?—he could, Oruch writes, “call upon his friends and followers to celebrate the day and to write Valentine poems.”

What else are you gonna do when you’re living in a series of English castles and can’t leave, but are too high-born to be expected to do any chores? Apparently several of his friends took him up on it, one commenting on this new custom, another playing it safe and writing his Valentine poem to his wife.

Thus another Valentine tradition was born.

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Selected Sources

Luminarium.“John Lydgate.”

Oruch, Jack. B. "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February." Speculum, Vol. 56, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 534–565. (Accessed from JSTOR database via Hennepin County Library.)

PoetryFoundation. “John Lydgate.”

14 Things about Valentine’s Day, No. 6: No, It’s Not about Lupercalia

Lupercalia image from the Univ. of Washington

In 1756, a Roman Catholic Priest named Alban Butler published the first of four volumes titled The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and other Principal Saints (generally shortened to Lives of the Saints), in which he wrote, “To abolish the heathens’ lewd superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls, in honour of their goddess Februata Juno, on the fifteenth of [February], several zealous pastors substituted the names of saints in billets [tickets or tags], given on this day.”

This claim was embellished further by English antiquarian Francis Douce in 1807, who stated that the custom of drawing names was a feature of the Roman holiday of Lupercalia, and that Lupercalia is the origin of the pairing-up customs we associate with Valentine’s Day.

In a 1916 article in the folkore journal The Lotus, the supposed pagan origin of Valentine’s Day is offered as a given.

“There is no surpise in being told that St. Valentine’s day is the Christianized form of the classic Lupercalia, which were feasts held in Rome during the month of February in honour of Pan and Juno and known as Juno Februata. Among other ceremonies it was customary to put the names of young women in a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. The Christian clergy, finding it difficult to extirpate the pagan practice, strove to give it a religious aspect by substituting names of particular saints for those of women.”

The drawing of saints’ names was supposed to inspire an imitation of said saint’s virtues throughout the following year. That some clergy actually did this at some point in time would not surprise me, but it was not part of any early adaptation of a pagan practice.

Nowadays, you will find many sources on the Web stating with an air of certainty and authority that the “real” origin of Valentine’s Day is the Lupercalia.

No. It isn’t.

Prof. Oruch, whose research tracing Valentine traditions to Chaucer was explained in an earlier post (see also source below), found no pagan/Lupercalia link to the holiday, and points to Butler and Douce as the sole sources of this myth.

About Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Oruch wrote, “Butler’s ideas were prompted, in all probability, by a confused knowledge of the date of this isolated event; a less charitable explanation would attribute his remarks to wishful or pious fantasy.”

And as for Douce’s Lupercalia connection, scholarly works such as “Some Notes on the Lupercalia,” by E. Sachs (source below), describe the holiday’s customs as involving young men running half-naked through the streets of Rome whacking people with strips of animal skin. None of the surviving eyewitness accounts (the festival continued into the 5th century) say anything about the drawing of names or any sort of pairing up.

The origin of the Lupercalia is itself quite murky, as is its conflation with the purification feast of Februa, which lent its name to the month. Even in Roman times, contemporary observers such as Plutarch (45–120 CE) were not sure when the Lupercalia, which took place on 15 February, got started.

History prof. John A. North, University College of  London, and classics prof. Neil McLynn, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, describe the origin and history of the Lupercalia something like this:

The festival probably began as a religious ritual sometimes referred to as Caesar’s Carnival, commemorating Rome’s founding legend (the name being related to lupus, Latin for wolf), and involving the sacrifice of a goat or goats, after which young men wearing the skins of the sacrificed animals ran through the streets carrying strips of the skins and hitting people with them. At some point, the custom became associated with a fertility ritual, and women would hold out their hands to be struck by the skins to ensure their own fertility.

The event morphed during Roman times into a kind of street theater, its exact purpose not entirely clear, except maybe for unruly youth to let off steam. It was still associated with the idea of conferring fertility, and infused with erotic overtones, if you know what I mean. Some accounts say that women were beaten, but it appears that it was much more benign and playful (in a bawdy sort of way) and consensual than that.

In the fifth century, Pope Gelasius banned the festival, though it is often said that he “converted” it to the Feast of the Purification, or Candlemas, which takes place on 2 February (40 days after Christmas). Whether the Christian Feast of the Purification is adapted from or influenced by the Roman Februa is a separate matter and not one I plan to address in the context of Valentine’s Day, but it’s clear that Pope Gelasius had no interest in “converting” pagan holidays; he banned them.

I will take a more general look at the implications of February’s place on the calendar at the midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and how that likely influenced the holidays we mark during this month, in my final post in this series.

Next up, some early Valentine customs in 15th century England.

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Sources

[author unknown] “Madame Valentine.” The Lotus Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 5 (Feb. 1916), pp. 234-238. (Accessed from JSTOR database via Hennepin County Library.)

Green, William M. “The Lupercalia in the Fifth Century.” Classical Philology. Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jan. 1931), pp. 60-69. An online article from the U Chicago.

North, J.A., and McLynn, Neil. “Postscript to the Lupercalia: from Caesar to Andromachus.” The Journal of Roman Studies. Vol. 98 (2008), pp. 176-181. (Accessed from JSTOR database via Hennepin County Library.)

Oruch, Jack. B. "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February." Speculum, Vol. 56, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 534–565. (Accessed from JSTOR database via Hennepin County Library.)

Sachs, E. “Some Notes on the Lupercalia.” The American Journal of Philology. Vol. 84, No. 3 (July 1963), pp. 266-279. (Accessed from JSTOR database via Hennepin County Library.)

Related Wikipedia articles:

“Alban Butler.” 

“Februa.” 

“Francis Douce.”

“Lupercalia.” 

14 Things about Valentine's Day, No. 2: Medieval Romances and a Popular Name

The name Valentine is derived from Latin valere, to be strong, and was popular in the late Roman empire. Several emperors and a pope were so named, and more than 30 Valentines (and a few Valentinas) were made saints, having been martyred for their faith, although the two mentioned in yesterday’s post were the most prominent, and the only ones to have made it into the Dictionary of Saints. The name was also popular in the middle ages, and members of the nobility would often name their sons and daughters Valentine or Valentina simply because they thought it to be a beautiful name.

Surviving stories about the lives of our two Saints Valentine were written in the 6th or 7th centuries, explained Professor Jack B. Oruch in a meticulously researched article published in the journal Speculum in 1981.* And the scribes who wrote them down were not so concerned about historical accuracy as they were about telling good stories that illuminated the great sacrifices made by the Christian founders, and to uphold the mythic traditions that had formed around this relatively new religion.

It’s not that they were trying to deceive anybody, it’s just that they didn’t want to spoil a good story for want a few facts. If there were any court records of the trials and punishments of these saints, they were long lost, so the scribes tapped oral tradition and took some liberties regarding who did what to whom, mixing it all up into a tantalizing literary stew that illustrated the greater truths they were most concerned with—that the saints performed miracles of healing, effected conversions, suffered martyrdom for their faith, and were rewarded by God. None of which had anything to do with love, romance, or marriage.

But there was a whole genre of medieval literature emerging from the courtly love tradition that was all about love and romance —and heroism. You know the sort: knights in shining armor going on daring quests and rescuing hapless high-born damsels from fiery dragons, and all that. These are collectively referred to as romances, because they were thought to have stemmed from Roman storytelling traditions.

And in a collection of these romances associated with the Carolingian era in France (9th–10th centuries) were stories about a hero named Valentine. Professor Oruch summarizes the story like this:

“In the romance story, Valentine is of noble birth and grows up to perform deeds of valor, falls in love, wins his lady Clerimonde, and after many adventures kills his father in battle by mistake. For his unintentional crime, Valentine does an extremely long and difficult penance, living away from his beloved wife in utter poverty and humility; as a result, he dies a holy man, causes the sick who visit his tomb to be healed, and is soon made a saint.”

In describing the grief Valentine’s widow expresses upon learning of his death, the story emphasizes his virtues as a lover and husband. But, says Oruch, the part about him being made a saint wasn’t in the original story; it was added much later.

And nowhere is this romance associated with a particular date in February. But it does offer a glimpse into an association between the name Valentine and traditions of romantic love eventually connected to it.

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* Oruch, Jack. B. "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February." Speculum,Vol. 56, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 534–565. (Accessed from JSTOR database via Hennepin County Library.)