Professor’s Quest : In Search of the Lovers’ St. Valentine

Feb. 14, everyone knows, is Valentine’s Day, a lovers’ celebration honoring the Roman patron saint of love and romance.

But everyone is wrong, UCLA Prof. Henry Ansgar Kelly contends. Not only have we been honoring the wrong saint, we have also been observing the wrong date. Valentine’s Day, he says, should be celebrated in the spring, most likely on May 3, in honor not of St. Valentine of Rome but of St. Valentine of Genoa, the first bishop of that city.

The evidence is mounting, Kelly says, that Valentine’s Day is the poetic invention of Geoffrey Chaucer, the 14th-Century English poet. Its introduction into popular culture as an actual celebration, he concludes, started inadvertently because of an act of whim by Isabel of Bavaria, a queen of France in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Kelly, an English literary scholar who has written numerous books on medieval literature and traditions, has based his conclusions about one of the world’s most beloved holidays on his recently completed study of the cult of St. Valentine and of Chaucer, author of “The Canterbury Tales.”

8-Year Search

The search for the origins of Valentine’s Day and the true identity of the patron saint of love took Kelly eight years. It led him to Genoa, Italy; it took him through an exhaustive search of 14th-Century records, manuscripts and the works of about 50 poets. It caused him to delve into a surprising range of disciplines, from ordinary history to hagiography (the study of the lives of saints) and from traditional literary criticism to medieval climatology.

Although it is sure to be challenged in years to come, Kelly’s work, even before it has been published, is assumed by many scholarly experts to be the definitive treatise on the origins of St. Valentine’s Day.

It is a “little-known fact,” Kelly wrote, that “the earliest references to St. Valentine in connection with love” occur in the 14th Century in four of Chaucer’s poems, the most familiar of which are the “Parliament of Fowls” and the “Legend of Good Women.”

One of the most compelling reasons for thinking that Feb. 14 is the wrong date to celebrate Valentine’s Day, Kelly said, is that the season described in those poems is clearly not winter.

A simple reading of the “Parliament of Fowls,” perhaps the most famous of the Chaucerian valentine poems, makes it clear, Kelly said, that it is spring--the mating season of birds--that is being observed.

The poem is set on a hillside where Nature has bid the fowls to come to choose their lovers. Nature declares that the royal tercel (male) eagle may go first. He selects the lovely formel (female) eagle but is challenged by two tercels of lower rank--one who claims to have loved her longer, the other to have loved her more earnestly. After a noisy dispute, Nature defers the decision to the formel eagle herself, who asks for a year to make up her mind.

At the end of the poem, the eagles who are not vying for the heart of the fair formel quickly take their own mates, sing a round of songs and fly away. (Another spring presumably will bring word of whether it is power, fidelity or earnestness that will win a girl’s heart.)

The mating of the birds and the flowery springtime setting of the “Parliament of Fowls” are surely “at variance with the expected conditions of mid-February,” Kelly wrote.

Similarly, he noted, in the prologue to the “Legend of Good Women” Chaucer tells of little birds rejoicing over their escape from the sword of winter and singing in praise of their mates and for “the newe blisful somers sake.”

“Comen is the May,” Chaucer wrote, and the birds are singing, “Blessed be seynt Valentyn/ For his day I chees yow to be myn,/ Withouten repentying, myn herte swete!”

Question of Date

Perhaps it was simply ignorance on Chaucer’s part of existing traditions that led him to fix the date of the celebration in the spring rather than the winter, Kelly said. But, he concluded, no such traditions seem to have existed in 14th-Century Europe. Indeed, he said, a search of documents from that period turned up no earlier references either in literature or in the records of the Roman Catholic Church linking St. Valentine with love.

“The celebration of St. Valentine as a patron of love was by no means a mass movement in the 14th and 15th centuries,” Kelly wrote. “Chaucer’s only rivals for the distinction of being the first to speak of the subject” are the writers Oton de Grandson of Savoy, John Gower of England and possibly Pardo of Valencia.

But even those poets, he said, seem to be referring to Chaucer’s invention rather than to a celebration already in existence. Kelly’s search next led him to a study of the medieval calendar and climatology to see if perhaps Februaries in Chaucer’s England were “full of flowers and mating birds.”

Although the medieval calendar was, in fact, nine days in advance of our own--thus placing the spring equinox about March 12 rather than March 21--it was not far enough ahead to suggest a dramatic difference in climate, Kelly concluded.

A spell of unseasonably warm weather in Chaucer’s day could also explain the situation, Kelly reasoned. But he found that Chaucer’s world was, if anything, colder than our own, beginning to feel the effects of what climatologists now call “the Little Ice Age.”

Medieval Heat Wave

Some scholars have argued that Chaucer was drawing on earlier traditions of warm springs from what is known as the Medieval Heat Wave, which for a time in the 12th and 13th centuries allowed for widespread cultivation of wine grapes in England, far north of what is their current northern limit in France. But even during those warmer winters, Kelly said, Feb. 14 was still too early for conditions of the sort Chaucer describes in his valentine poems.

One argument put forth by some scholars that is difficult to address, Kelly admitted, is that Chaucer simply used his imagination and a healthy dose of “poetic magic” to create May gardens in the middle of winter. In the world of poetry, of course, it is possible for flowers to bloom and birds to mate on Feb. 14 as if it were Valentine’s Day.

The argument in favor of February, Kelly said, is bolstered by the fact that up to 50 people named Valentine were venerated by the Roman Catholic Church, and at least eight of them were saints associated with Feb. 14. Presumably, any one of them could have been the St. Valentine.

The “two principal claimants to veneration on Feb. 14,” Kelly said, are Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Interamna (now Terni) in Umbria, the first a priest and the second a bishop. Both are said to have been martyred, Kelly said.

Lives of Saints Confused

The legends of St. Valentine that today appear in children’s books and encyclopedias tend to confuse the lives of the two and, in some cases, bring in details of other St. Valentines--thus reflecting the consternation of scholars as to who the patron saint of love really is.

In fact, Kelly said, there is not any evidence, either in church records or historical accounts, to suggest that either St. Valentine of Rome or St. Valentine of Terni was ever associated with feasts of love, let alone thought to be its patron saint.

Turning next to the Valentines who were honored in the spring, Kelly found only one around whom there was a “real cult or actually observed feast day,” namely St. Valentine of Genoa, the first bishop of that city. Little is known of him except that he probably lived in the 1st Century. Although the year of his death is uncertain, church records indicate that he died on May 3.

In Chaucer’s day, however, his festival was observed on May 2--”no doubt,” Kelly said, “to assure the saint his own religious and civic holiday, since May 3 was already the great feast day” celebrating the finding of the Holy Cross (a celebration no longer observed by the Roman Catholic Church).

That by itself certainly does not prove that St. Valentine of Genoa is the patron saint of love or that May 2 or 3 should be the feast day of romance. But, Kelly argues, there was an incident in Chaucer’s own lifetime that suggests it was early May when he intended his “fanciful invention” of St. Valentine’s Day to be observed.

Betrothal of Richard II

Indeed, early May in 1381 was the time of one of the most romantic events of the 14th Century: Richard II, the King of England, was betrothed to Anne of Bohemia on May 2, 1381. The betrothal, Kelly said, was probably ratified by the king the next day, May 3--the day of the anniversary of the death of St. Valentine of Genoa.

If true that Chaucer invented Valentine’s Day and intended, at least poetically, for it to be celebrated in May, what caused the date to be moved to February in actual practice?

Kelly believes that it was probably simple “ignorance of Chaucer’s original intentions.”

The earliest known association of Valentine’s Day with Feb. 14, according to Kelly, occurred in 1400, the year of Chaucer’s death.

It appeared in the Charter of the Court of Love, a document drawn up at the inspiration of Isabel of Bavaria, the queen of France. The charter set out the rules and membership of a medieval love club. Each year, Kelly said, translating from the charter, on “the day of My Lord St. Valentine”--which was said to be the 14th day of February--there was to be held “a dinner and joyous recreation for the entire retinue of the court.”

Court of Love

In later years, stories about what were thought to be the activities of the Court of Love circulated widely throughout Europe and, given the public’s penchant for imitating royalty and overlooking detail, had an influence on society. In recent decades, however, scholars have concluded that the court never existed and that its charter was simply a hoax, designed on a whim by the queen as a diversion during a time of plague.

In other words, though the original Valentine’s Day was nothing more than a fictitious festival in a Chaucerian poem, a queen, in a moment of whimsy, employed it in her fantasized court of love--apparently without much concern for the correct saint or season. Other poets and lovers followed suit, either on their own or inspired by Queen Isabel’s court, until eventually a Feb. 14 Valentine’s Day found its way into tradition and stayed there for the next 600 years.

Inspired by a valentine from his wife, Kelly, 51, who is vice chairman for graduate studies in UCLA’s English department, wrote to Hallmark Cards last Feb. 14 to suggest, in jest, that the company might be interested in celebrating a second Valentine’s Day “in the spring, when young men’s fancy actually do lightly turn to thoughts of love.”

“Or perhaps,” Kelly wrote, “you could arrange a switch with Mother’s Day and put that in February: it would be nine months after the May mating season, and so the right time for girls to become mothers!”

A book on his work, “Chaucer and the Cult of Saint Valentine,” will become part of a medieval studies series at the University of California, Davis. Kelly says the book itself is scheduled to be published by E. J. Brill of the Netherlands “in time for Valentine’s Day--May 3.”