How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways.

Snoopy enjoying Valentine's Day in true teenage fashion

 February 14 arrives again with the unlimited commercial opportunities for Valentine cards, roses and romantic candlelit tetes-a-tetes!! Plus, universal teenage anticipation and expectation and hope. I have been wondering how and why Valentine’s Day was born and discover Lupercalia, a pagan festival to celebrate fertility which seems to be the forerunner.  There were several Christian martyrs named Valentine though Valentine’s Day itself may have taken its name from the priest who was martyred about 270 CE by the Roman Emperor Claudius 11.

"When every fowl comes there to 
choose a mate."

 

Chaucer's Parlement of Foules 1381/2

When Lupercalia
progressed through Europe properly, the Roman Catholic Church eventually stepped in to enforce a more sober approach to celebrating amorous encounters.  In the English-speaking world, over the centuries, the romantic aspects of St Valentine’s Day have been celebrated by eloquent leading poets and playwrights like Chaucer and Shakespeare and this popularised the name, the emotional aspects and the date. The first known written reference to Saint Valentine’s Day as a day for lovers was in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules in 1381when he wrote: ’When every fowl comes there to choose a mate’

I now see that in some form or other, a celebration of love and romance appears in most calendars world-wide.  Although I spent a lot of time in Wales when my children were young, I had never heard of St Dwynwen’s Day, a day of romance celebrated on January 25th and in addition to the Valentine exchange of cards, gifts and romantic meals, it also involves ‘love spoons’.  For the young woman, a wooden spoon is presented as a love token; it was, originally carved by the besotted young man for his intended often with symbols important to the couple carved or embossed on it. It was a significant signal of his interest.

Dia dos Namorados, the Day of the Enamoured, is celebrated in Brazil on June 12th with lots of noise from large dances, music, food and epic parties attended by family and friends, plus, of course, the exchange of gifts by the happy couple.  The Day of St Anthony, the patron saint of marriage, is on June 13th hence the appetiser known as the Dia dos Namorados on June 12th.  It is also traditional for the happy couple to send loving messages to each other throughout the day.

La Dia de Sant Jordi
Extraordinary Jordification of an
apartment building

Catalonia, much like the U.K. celebrates St George’s Day [La Dia de Sant Jordi] on April 23rd to honour their patron saint. This is also the National Day of Catalonia and the traditional time for lovers to exchange gifts, normally, books.  The suggestion I have read for featuring the date for lovers, and the traditional book-as-gift, is because William Shakespeare died on April 23rd and Cervantes, Spain’s most famous writer, died the day before on April 22nd, both in the year 1616! This sounds to me extraordinarily literary and worthy. Can it be true?

Book market in Catalonia on La Dia de
Sant Jordi.
A civilised way to celebrate romance!

Tu B'Av

The Hebrew or Jewish St Valentine’s Day , Tu B’Av  [the 15th day of Av when Av is the 11th month of the civil year and the fifth month of the ecclesiastical year.] like many Jewish festivals, actually begins on the evening before, on the 14th as that is the night of a full moon in the Hebrew lunar calendar  In fact, it went out of style for Jewish people to celebrate this festival for almost two millennia, but it has been resurrected in modern Israel. The old version of Tu B’Av took place during a full moon following ancient practice though there seems to be a dispute about the date; the festival itself, is not mentioned in any Hebraic texts until the second century. The modern version, [sunset on Friday 8th August/sundown, Saturday 9th] is not a religious event, and the relatively recent revival is more secular with singing and dancing and celebration. It is generally thought to be an auspicious day for weddings to take place.  

Feast of Qixi: Remembering the star-crossed lovers.
Traditionally, the day to drink red bean tea to ensure
future satisfactory personal romance

Qixi Festival known also as the Chinese Valentine’s Day, happens on the 7th day of the 7th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. In 2025 it will fall on August 29th. Previously known as the Qi Qiao, or the Girls’ Festival, Qixi has a long tradition stretching back to the Han Dynasty [approximately 206 BC-220AD] Although traditional Qixi Festival activities would have included a girl placing a needle in a bowl of water overnight to determine if she was good at embroidery, many people nowadays, present gifts and greeting cards in much the same way as Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the West.

Silver jewellery of the Miao people celebrating the festival

 IIn the Guizhou Province in China there lives a minority ethnic group, the Miao and their celebration of love and Spring, the Sisters’ Meal Festival happens between 30th April and 2nd of May. The event presents a spectacle with bright traditional costumes, ostentatious displays of jewellery, singing and dancing with a question-and-answer format between single men and women as well as bullfighting and horse racing. The origins of the festival go back in folklore telling of two childhood friends who grow up and fall in love but are forbidden to marry. In the tale, the girl brings the boy a hidden meal of specially flavoured rice to display her affection in their secret meetings. The term, gad liangi or hidden meal has entered the Miao language as a term meaning ‘secret admirer’

                                                                   

                                                                   And as a postscript!

I have been reading ‘God’s Own Gentlewoman’ a lovely life of the fifteenth century Margaret Paston, chiefly through her letters and family memoirs.**  Margaret became deeply involved in the protracted marriage negotiations between the Paston and the Brews families, the principals of which were John Paston 111 (Margaret’s son) and Margery Brews, a distant cousin. The difficulties were over the lack of generosity in the proposed Brews’ marriage settlement but there are two letters, written by the bride-to-be, Margery, to John 111 which show the mutual love between the couple and her longing for the marriage to take place.   The author of the book, Diane Watt, suggests that the two letters can lay claim to having been the first Valentine missives in English. The first is partly written in rhyming couplets: ‘My heart commands me evermore to love you /Truly above all earthly thing.’

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: God's Own Gentlewoman

In her second letter, also written in February 1477, Margery expresses the hope that her ‘good, faithful and loving Valentine’ will accept her poor person, and insists she will accept his decision (of whether to marry her or not) ‘on condition that I may be your faithful lover and petitioner for the duration of my life.’   The decision to marry was his alone but Margery is surprisingly open about her feelings for John and her desire for the marriage to take place.

Six centuries later, these two earliest Valentines do illustrate the profound social differences exemplified in  the commercially choreographed celebrations of today and their implied gender egality. The mediaeval English also often charms: "The fairest flower in our garland."

**This collecton of state papers and other important documents including the correspondence of an important Norfolk gentry family, are a noted primary source for information about life in England  during the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudor period.