Blame Falls on Chaucer for Valentine's Day

At Lit Hub on this Valentine's Day, Emily Temple gives readers (and lovers) the backstory to how Valentine's Day came to be. The prime culprit? The great 14th-century bard, Geoffrey Chaucer. As Temple writes, citing  Jack B. Oruch, "despite the claims of some critics, there is no evidence of any 'Valentine convention' (as we understand it today) in 'literary or social customs, before Chaucer.'" More from there:

Instead, St. Valentine became known in the centuries after his (their) death(s) as the patron saint of epilepsy. And beekeepers. And as a matter of simplicity (and research) the three obviously became one.

And that was that, just bees and seizures, until one Geoffrey Chaucer stuck his pen in.

The earliest known suggestion that Valentine’s Day was a day for lovers comes from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century poem “The Parliament of Fowls,” in which “Seynt Valentynes day” is the day “whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make” (i.e., in case it’s been a long time since AP English, when birds come to choose their mates). Considering Chaucer was basically the equivalent of a Kardashian in his day, the people—starting with his friends, of course, notably poets Oton de Granson III and John Gower—followed his lead and began to use the feast of St. Valentine for their romantic purposes. The earliest surviving explicit “Valentine” we have is from about a hundred years later—in February 1477, Margery Brews wrote to her fiancé John Paston, calling him her “right well-beloved valentine.”

The plot thickens, so head to Lit Hub to read on! And then treat your sweetheart to a poem from our collection of love poems here.