Sophia Deboick The Battle for Valentine's Day
[Sophia Deboick is a historian and writer on popular culture.]
The development of Valentine's Day into the orgy of commercialised sentimentality we know today has been a long process, with Roman paganism and the poets of the middle ages both making a contribution to the day's current associations with romance, love and sex. But the reclaiming of the day by fundamentalist Christians to further the agenda of the religious right has added a new chapter to this long history.
The Romans were more responsible for the association of 14 February with sexual love than the Christian saint (or saints) who gave the day its name. On 14 February Juno Fructifier, queen of the Roman gods and goddess of women and marriage, was celebrated. The following day was the Feast of Lupercalia, a festival even more overtly associated with fertility and sexual rambunctiousness. The focus of the festival in Rome itself was the grotto at the foot of the Palatine Hill where Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been suckled by a she-wolf. Here a goat would be sacrificed and youths known as Luperci were dressed in its skin, before proceeding through the city, hitting women and girls with strips of goat skin – a ritual meant to guarantee their fertility.
The Christian contribution to the development of the Valentine's Day tradition was rather less racy although equally dramatic. There are two saint Valentines mentioned under 14 February in the early martyrologies – one was a priest from Rome, the other a bishop of modern Terni. Both were martyred in the late third century, the first possibly for conducting marriage ceremonies when they had been temporarily banned by Claudius II to curb draft-dodging. The Acts of both martyrs are unreliable and they may have been the same person – the Carmelite Church in Dublin claims possession of the relics of this amalgamated saint. A third Saint Valentine is an even more shadowy figure – all that is known of him is that he was martyred in Africa alongside several other Christians....
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
The development of Valentine's Day into the orgy of commercialised sentimentality we know today has been a long process, with Roman paganism and the poets of the middle ages both making a contribution to the day's current associations with romance, love and sex. But the reclaiming of the day by fundamentalist Christians to further the agenda of the religious right has added a new chapter to this long history.
The Romans were more responsible for the association of 14 February with sexual love than the Christian saint (or saints) who gave the day its name. On 14 February Juno Fructifier, queen of the Roman gods and goddess of women and marriage, was celebrated. The following day was the Feast of Lupercalia, a festival even more overtly associated with fertility and sexual rambunctiousness. The focus of the festival in Rome itself was the grotto at the foot of the Palatine Hill where Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been suckled by a she-wolf. Here a goat would be sacrificed and youths known as Luperci were dressed in its skin, before proceeding through the city, hitting women and girls with strips of goat skin – a ritual meant to guarantee their fertility.
The Christian contribution to the development of the Valentine's Day tradition was rather less racy although equally dramatic. There are two saint Valentines mentioned under 14 February in the early martyrologies – one was a priest from Rome, the other a bishop of modern Terni. Both were martyred in the late third century, the first possibly for conducting marriage ceremonies when they had been temporarily banned by Claudius II to curb draft-dodging. The Acts of both martyrs are unreliable and they may have been the same person – the Carmelite Church in Dublin claims possession of the relics of this amalgamated saint. A third Saint Valentine is an even more shadowy figure – all that is known of him is that he was martyred in Africa alongside several other Christians....