The Story of Valentine’s Day

Behind February 14 there stand at least two early Christian martyrs named Valentine — a priest in Rome and a bishop in Terni — both executed on that date, in different years of the third century, under the emperor Claudius II. The legends that gathered around them are sweet ones: that Valentine married young couples in secret after the emperor forbade it, and that, thrown in prison, he healed his jailer's blind daughter and left her a note signed "your Valentine." Pope Gelasius I set the feast of St. Valentine on February 14 in the year 496.

You'll often hear that the date was chosen to cover up Rome's wild February festival, Lupercalia. It's a tidy story — and honestly, the direct link has never been proven. Mostly, the two observances just shared a season that was hungry for purification and pairing off. The romance came much later. In Chaucer's poem The Parliament of Fowls, from about 1382, the birds choose their mates "on Seynt Valentynes day," and the idea caught fire in the courts of England and France. Lovers started exchanging verses. The oldest valentine that still survives was written in 1415 by a French duke locked in the Tower of London, writing to his wife. Paper lace and printed cards followed, and by the 1840s Esther Howland was running a valentine business in America.

In the Grove: a martyr who married people in secret, a jailer's daughter, and a poet's birds. Love writing letters it wasn't supposed to write. We'll keep that day.