History of Valentine's Day

As is apparent in advertising, popular culture, and bedrooms alike, the modern construction of Valentine’s Day undoubtedly revolves around invocations of amorous love. But in a consultation of various internet resources, we can identify no definitive explanation for the glut of DeBeers ads and restaurant reservations occurring in the second week in February. Yet many websites do in fact agree that the genesis of Valentine’s Day begins in Roman times.

Wikipedia, which has established itself as a sort of, if not the ultimate standard-bearer of non-scholarly internet based knowledge, postulates that Valentine’s day may have grew out of an ancient fertility holiday celebrated every February 15^th called Lupercalia. This holiday, as Plutarch, a Roman historian, tells us, featured young men walking naked in the streets, and young women would approach them and be smacked on the hands that they might become fertile. This holiday may have grown out of a tradition celebrating the birth of Romulus and Remus, according to legend the twin brothers raised by a wolf who founded Rome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine's_Day.

Suite 101.com, a website that claims “7 million readers a month,” also supposes the Lupercalia theory, but adds that one part of the practice included sacrifices of goats and dogs to the gods. Suite 101 also maintains that in the fifth century, the Catholic church translated the formerly pagan holiday, which remained popular with ordinary Romans, into a Christian context, honoring the Virgin Mary and making it a popular day for marrying young couples. Suite 101 seems plausible, as it does claim that it gathered its information from the Oxford University Press Dictionary of Religion and the University of Chicago’s Penelope Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. http://roman-history.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_lupercalia_a_roman_festival.

The History Channel offers a completely different explanation, saying that an early Christian priest named Valentine offered to marry young couples in secret, against a decree of the emperor, who dissolved all marriages in an attempt to get more soldiers for the army. Valentine was placed in prison for this, and subsequently fell in love with his jailor’s daughter, to whom he penned a note, “From your Valentine.” http://www.history.com/minisites/valentine/viewPage?pageId=882 In fairness, however, the HC does offer the alternate explanation that the church did try to Christianize the Lupercalia.

As a survey of numerous websites will illustrate, the history of Valentine’s day does in fact credibly trace its origins to the Lupercalian myth and the subsequent Christianization. Yet not every website does this. For instance, Wikipedia’s explanation does not omit that Valentine’s Day is named after two potential early Christian martyrs, but never definitively discusses how or why these names became attached to the holiday, as Suite101 and HC do.

Generally, this experience revealed the inconsistency of historical information on the Internet. Because each user can function in relative anonymity and slick graphics can misleadingly function as a substitute for substantive content. This process was in a sense discouraging. So many websites had varying explanations, and were often poorly written For instance, on a Google search of “History of Valentine’s Day,” the third link leads to a UK website which offers four very different theses on the origin of Valentine’s day. Not only is the website’s legitimacy completely undercut by a pink color scheme, usually reserved for all things germane to a pre-pubescent teenage girl, but each account is anonymously authored. Furthermore, if the user accessed the address of only the text before the host country domain name in the web address http://www.pictureframes.co.uk/pages/saint_valentine.htm, it redirects to a British picture frame store. How in the world is this site supposed to maintain any semblance of accuracy? Ultimately, information on the internet has to be weighed against several criteria, most importantly if it is cited in a scholarly book or not. While Wikipedia does have many articles that are thoroughly cited, many other articles are not. In the future, we can hope for the internet community to give these articles some legitimacy, and in the process hopefully deliver a death blow to other, less accurate sites.