| No matter how you personally feel about Valentine’s Day (which is this week, in case you hadn’t noticed), don’t forget that you can blame Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer, you say? What does Chaucer have to do with it? After all, St. Valentine was a third-century Roman martyr, whose saint’s day is February 14. Hence, Valentine’s Day. Simple, right? Not so much. According to Professor Lisa Bitel, no fewer than three (3) different martyrs named Valentinus died on February 14th, all of them during a two-year period towards the end of the third century. Jack B. Oruch reports that the name was so popular that over 30 Valentines, not to mention “a few Valentinas,” ultimately achieved sainthood. However, no matter which Valentine you look at, their traditions and texts actually have . . . absolutely nothing to do with love or courtship. As Oruch has noted, despite the claims of some critics, there is no evidence of any “Valentine convention” (as we understand it today) in “literary or social customs, before Chaucer.” Instead, St. Valentine—whittled down to one—became known in the centuries after his (their) death(s) as the patron saint of epilepsy. And beekeepers. And that was that, just looking after bees and seizures, until one Geoffrey Chaucer stuck his pen in. The earliest known suggestion that Valentine’s Day was a day for lovers comes from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century poem “The Parliament of Fowls,” in which “Seynt Valentynes day” is the day “whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make” (i.e., in case it’s been a long time since AP English, when birds come to choose their mates). Considering Chaucer was basically the equivalent of a Kardashian in his day, the people—starting with his friends, of course, notably poets Oton de Granson III and John Gower—followed his lead and began to use the feast of St. Valentine for their romantic purposes. The earliest surviving explicit “Valentine” we have is from about a hundred years later—in February 1477, Margery Brews wrote to her fiancé John Paston, calling him her “right well-beloved valentine.” Why Chaucer thought spring was in mid-February is another matter. It’s still cold, my dude. Possibly it was due to the fact that “the date of the beginning of spring was far from being set firmly in the 14th century,” Oruch writes. Calendars were wildly different from each other, and in Chaucer’s day, if you looked at a calendar, you “probably would have found the beginning of spring marked at February 7 or 22 or (much more likely) at both.” At the very least, Chaucer’s February 14th would have been more like our February 23rd, which at least gets us within spitting distance of March. So was Chaucer was just really ahead of his time on the whole global warming idea, or is this really is when birds choose their mates? According to Oruch, “quite a few birds do pair during February in England, including the missel thrush, raven, partridge, rook, heron, grebe, lapwing, and blackbird.” Okay, then. Poets like William Shakespeare and John Donne continued Chaucer’s tradition in their poetry, Bitel explains, further cementing St. Valentine’s reputation as a patron of romantic love. And, she writes, “by the 19th century, English consumers were ready and eager for cards with poems already printed on them, preferably decorated with love birds, hearts and Cupid (rather than the image of a headless Roman bishop). The London Journal of 1858 supported the custom of exchanging observance love tokens on Valentine’s Day, declaring that it was both ‘natural’ and ‘proper’ that, at the start of spring, ‘the predominating sentiment in the human mind should be the sentiment of love; and to this accordingly the anniversary of our saint is directed.’ However, the publication preferred home-made cards to mass-produced Valentines, about which the editors opined: ‘If we were to give a general character, we would say they are very trashy and not a little vulgar; and . . .the production of mercenaries for hire.’ So whatever your hippie parents say, rebelling against the corporate nature of Valentine’s Day isn’t exactly new. But now at least you can blame all the lovey-dovey stuff on Chaucer—whether that makes you ignore or celebrate it depends entirely on your own temperament. |
(lithub.com)