Gettysburg College Professor Says Poets Invented Valentine's Day Romance

GETTYSBURG, Pa., Jan. 23 (AScribe Newswire) -- How did Valentine's Day - a day honoring a pagan fertility rite and later the grisly martyrdom of St. Valentine - ever come to be associated with romance? "It all started with the greatest love poets in the English language," according to Gettysburg College's Steve Anderson.

In the year 496, Pope Gelasius created a feast day for St. Valentine, a martyred third-century priest. He chose Feb. 14, which was one day after Lupercal, a festival held in ancient Rome to promote fertility and ward off disasters, according to Anderson, a professor in Gettysburg's Department of English. "Apparently, he hoped that early Christians would celebrate their romantic traditions a day early and dedicate them to the saint rather than to the Roman love goddess Juno," Anderson said. "The feast day stuck, but the romantic holiday didn't."

Moving forward to the long, cold, dreary winters of medieval England, Chaucer - famous for writing "The Canterbury Tales" - got together with his fellow poets and invented a new holiday on Feb. 14 to lift their patrons' spirits. In a poem titled "The Parliament of Fowls," Chaucer claimed that all the birds in the world gather to choose their mates on St. Valentine's Day. "Unlike Pope Gelasius's feast day, Chaucer's 'lovebirds' took off," Anderson said.

By the Renaissance, according to Anderson, Valentine's Day was well established as a romantic holiday. "Shakespeare refers to Chaucer's poem in his play, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' gives the name 'Valentine' to characters in two of his other romantic comedies and has Ophelia, in 'Hamlet,' sing that she wants to 'be your Valentine,'" he said.

And then, in the 1840s, the first commercial Valentines appeared. "Flowers and chocolates and those awful, chalky candies followed," Anderson said, "but it all started with Chaucer and Shakespeare," Anderson said.

With a student body of approximately 2,400, Gettysburg College is a highly selective four-year residential college of liberal arts and sciences located on a 200-acre campus adjacent to the Gettysburg National Military Park. The college was founded in 1832.