The martyred men seem to have suffered similar fates. In the most well-known story about St. Valentine of Rome, he was imprisoned for being Christian. The family who held him had a daughter who lost her vision, and Valentine is said to have performed a miracle by restoring her sight. That convinced the whole family to convert to Christianity with Valentine’s help. The emperor did not like this and ordered his execution. Before his death, the saint allegedly sent the girl a note signed “Your Valentine.” Although it is hard to determine the truth from legend, different versions of the story show up in the Roman martyrologies, where lives of saints are collected and compiled, Nelson says.
The other St. Valentine in Italy is identified as the bishop of Terni. Legend holds he married couples in secret after Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young couples, believing that unwed men would make better soldiers. This defiance similarly provoked the emperor’s ire and led to Valentine’s beheading.
“What’s interesting about St. Valentine is that he does seem to have had his own church on the outskirts of Rome,” Nelson says. “The bones of at least some St. Valentine were disinterred from that church and…put in another early Christian church in Rome.”
This relocation signals he was a saint of some importance. Today, other churches, including ones in Prague, Dublin and Missouri, claim to possess some of the saint’s bones, blood or other artifacts.
What is St. Valentine the patron saint of?
At one time, St. Valentine was considered more important than he is today. Historically, a feast of St. Valentine appeared on Catholic calendars, though it has since been removed.
Since the 15th century, one of the men known as St. Valentine has been considered the patron saint of people with epilepsy. He is also known as the patron saint of plague victims and beekeepers. More recently, St. Valentine has been associated with the title of patron saint of lovers, but that designation is debated.
“It’s in the very late 18th century [when] people start to invent stories that make him the patron saint of lovers,” Nelson says. “But he would be shocked [by that] I think.”
Why don’t we call the holiday St. Valentine’s Day?
The holiday’s transition from St. Valentine’s Day to simply Valentine’s Day reflects our changing attitudes toward its namesake.
For centuries, the mid-February feast day honoring St. Valentine included his honorific title. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Fowls,” written in the early 1380s and often cited as one of the oldest existing references to St. Valentine’s Day, he calls it such.
But the holiday gradually focused less on the Christian martyr as time passed. St. Valentine’s Day became a significant marker of time, as his feast happens to fall right around the start of spring on medieval Catholic calendars, Nelson explains.
In the 18th century, an antiquarian named Henry Bourne wrote what is probably the first documented history of Valentine’s Day. “[In it,] he calls it—quite intentionally—Valentine’s Day, not Saint Valentine’s Day,” Nelson says. Bourne’s 1725 book describes a folk tradition in which people relied on a random lottery to be paired with a Valentine. His only mention of St. Valentine is in a footnote that identifies the man.
The holiday’s religious connection and the St. Valentine’s Day moniker resurged at the end of the 18th and into the 19th centuries as a way to reconcile the stories about the saint. Now, we have gone back to calling it Valentine’s Day because we do not really care much about St. Valentine anymore, Nelson says.
