That, and as with a lot of nominally Catholic/Christian festivals, it’s probably a replacement for an older pagan festival:
Besides, in many places in the Northern Hemisphere at least, chocolate is a good way to beat the late-winter blahs.
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There are various accounts of St. Valentinus, in some of which he himself was a soldier who became a priest and in others of which he was simply a priest, but one who may have converted Roman soldiers and persuaded them to marry against the decrees of Claudius (the third century AD one, not the I CLAVDIVS one).
The story may have been improved to make it fit the Valentine theme (i.e. people getting married) and he may simply have been executed, along with some of his covnerts, for preaching to the Army, which was forbidden.
Information on the Internet, I now find, seems to recycle the same sources.
Pope Gelasius (5th century CE) looked for a suitable Roman martyr to be the placeholder for Lupercalia, a very NSFW festival involving animal sacrifice, flagellation, and randomised sex with strangers. He needed a saint martyred on or around 13-15 Feb., and Valentine got the job.
Chaucer did not originate the idea of courtly love. That happened in the centre of European civilisation - Provence, Northern Italy - that was largely wiped out by the Catholic Church. Anglocentricity tends to conceal from us that until we got very militarily successful, Britain was rather a cultural backwater occupied by Norman thugs. We then became a major European state run by Norman thugs. However, I digress.
You get an idea of what the Provencal upper classes were like from a few famous lines in Dante - the courtly circumlocution with which Arnaut addresses Dante:
“Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman, qu’ ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire. Ieu sui Arnaut”
“Your courteous request so much pleases me that I neither wish nor am able to conceal from you that I am Arnaut”.
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I never meant to imply such: merely that the association between courtly love and St. Valentine is not recorded to exist before Chaucer mentions it.
Yes, Pope Gelasius ended the celebration of Lupercalia, and yes, the same Pope added St. Valentine to the calendar of saints. However, I can’t find anything reliable that states that the one was in replacement of the other. Lupercalia seems to have been more a celebration of the Romulus/Remus myth.
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I dunno. “Easter” was pretty transparent.
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Bede’s claim is the only evidence that it was named after a pagan goddess.
But Easter is the celebration of Iesus rising from the dead. And there’s a strong association between rising, dawn, and east.
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While I understand those feels, I personally adore the 15th of February; all the Godiva Vday candy is half-price.
Damn those Canterbury Tales!
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@Voynaimor
@nimelennar
@gadgetgirl
@Lucy_Gothro
No offense to all the history buffs, but you guys are starting to derail a tad.
Someone please make a new post if we want to continue discussing the pagan/historical origins of now-commercial holidays.
Thanks.
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Bruges, Belgium.
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Sorry…
I am just going out and I may be gone for some time.
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Aw, beat me to it.
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Before you ask, yes, it’s just like a fucking fairy tale.
Blame OtherMichael for making me watch that movie. I’d never seen it before we moved here.
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No prob.
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I literally can’t even.
I should be putting the laptop in my bag, grabbing my coat and going home, but the thought of the commute on top of everything else is just too much.
Oh, well…
Suck it up and Drive On.
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So… it’s a horribly cruel cautionary tale?
Because that’s what the real, non sugar-coated stories were, before Disney homogenized and whitewashed them in the name of capitalism.
Many original ‘faerie tales’ from both Grimm and Andersen don’t have “happy endings.”
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Nah. More like… when I went there, we were hanging out in the famous main square, like tourists do, and this wedding party came bicycling up. Everyone was in fancy clothes from the waist up, and practical jeans and comfy shoes from the waist down. They took wedding photos in front of the big fountain, then rode off again. The bride and groom rode a tandem bike.
Later we did a historical tour of the old city in a horse and buggy. Halfway through the horse gets a mandatory break, and I asked if I could scratch his ears since he kept trying to shift the harness around. The horse liked the ear scritchies so much he pushed his head against my hand when I went to take it away, and the guide extended the break a couple minutes until the horse was ready to get back to work.
All that and loads of medieval architecture.
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That’s what makes my name redundant.
Pixies aren’t nice.
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That actually sounds pretty cool.
Real talk; in all the stories I read, they were some malicious, spiteful little fuckers.
If one reads the original versions, it seems like most of the fey were…
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It would only be polite to let people know that I’m leaving this site for a while which may be permanent. You are all very nice people, it has often been fun, but recently I have felt more and more strongly that I don’t fit. I have also decided that the problems facing my own country are so severe that I should be spending my time trying to support people doing something about them rather than taking an interest in US affairs. From here the US is an increasingly strange, foreign country that has a largely malign influence on us, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Perhaps things will change after November. Perhaps my perspective will change. I’m making this post purely to let people know that I won’t be seeing any responses to any past ones of mine, so if you don’t get a reply I am not ignoring you.
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