Most holidays have pretty clear origin stories and reasons for their celebration. But Valentine’s Day has a complicated history. February 14, a date we now associate as a Hallmark holiday with hearts, flowers, cards and grand gestures, was not always celebrated as a day of love.
How and when Valentine’s Day started is “a complicated story,” says Elizabeth White Nelson, an associate professor of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in 19th-Century America. “The short answer is that we really don’t know. The longer answer is that there are a series of different theories that are overlapping.”
St. Valentine’s Day was originally a Catholic feast day established in A.D. 496 to honor a third-century priest named Valentine who was executed on February 14. Although the Catholic church still recognizes St. Valentine, it removed his feast day from its calendar in 1969.
However, Valentine’s Day as we now know it likely originated as a folk practice to celebrate springtime in mid-17th century England. Nelson points to a 1725 account about the holiday from an antiquarian named Henry Bourne. “He calls it quite intentionally Valentine’s Day not St. Valentine’s Day and makes the point in his book…that St. Valentine had nothing to do with the holiday at all,” she says. Bourne describes a custom whereby men and women were paired together as Valentines through random drawings; the matchmaking lottery became a good omen for a couple’s future marriage.
The initial observers were English commoners often from rural areas, but widespread adoption of the holiday celebrating love and the tradition of sending Valentine’s cards did not set in until the late 18th century in England, Nelson says.
At that time, English clergymen who were antiquarians decided to find the origins of folk holidays, including Valentine’s Day. That desire continued into the 1800s across Victorian England and the United States. “In a sense, the origin of Valentine’s Day is really a 19th century obsession more than anything,” Nelson says.
Another theory is that Valentine’s Day came from the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, known for its feasts, ritual sacrifice and sexually charged celebrations on February 15. However, modern scholars view Lupercalia as a precursor to Valentine’s Day rather than an originator of the modern holiday given their few similarities.
The timing of Valentine’s Day has roots in the Catholic Church. Pope Gelasius I selected February 14 to honor the martyrdom of St. Valentine on the anniversary of his beheading.
At the same time, Nelson explains, the Catholic Church organized the medieval calendar, which marked the start of spring in February, right around February 14. When Chaucer wrote of birds’ mating season at the beginning of spring, it coincided with St. Valentine’s Day per the medieval calendar.
“It’s, I think, an overlapping of these things where most people don’t have clocks, don’t read very well, don’t tell time [and] time as they understand it is organized by the calendar of the church,” Nelson says.
