Table of Contents
The modern Valentine’s Day presents a striking paradox.
It is a global commercial juggernaut, an industry generating billions of dollars annually through the sale of flowers, greeting cards, and chocolates—all in the name of love.1
Yet, this behemoth of consumer culture traces its name to an obscure Christian martyr from the 3rd century, a figure so shrouded in legend that his true identity remains a matter of historical debate.3
How did a day established to commemorate a saint—one whose acts were described by a 5th-century pope as being “known only to God” 5—transform so completely into a worldwide, secular festival of romance and, ultimately, a cornerstone of the retail calendar?
The answer is that Valentine’s Day was not “invented” by a single person or for a single reason.
It is a cultural composite, a palimpsest sculpted over two millennia by the successive and overlapping forces of primal pagan ritual, strategic Christian appropriation, the soaring imagination of medieval poetry, and the relentless ingenuity of modern commerce.
Its story is not one of simple creation but of gradual and often contradictory evolution.
The “inventors” of this holiday are a diverse cast: the naked priests of ancient Rome, the pious mythmakers of the early Church, a revolutionary English poet, a lovesick 15th-century noblewoman, an enterprising Victorian woman, and the marketing visionaries of the Industrial Age.
To trace the history of Valentine’s Day is to uncover the hidden threads that connect a bloody fertility rite in a Roman cave to the heart-shaped box of chocolates on a 21st-century store shelf.
This report will unravel that complex narrative, revealing how a day for a forgotten saint became a day for lovers.
Table 1: The Evolution of Valentine’s Day: A Chronological Overview
| Era / Period | Key Figures / Events | Dominant Meaning / Practice | Key Artifacts / Texts |
| Pre-Christian Rome (c. 6th Cent. BC – 5th Cent. AD) | Luperci Priests, Romulus & Remus | Fertility, Purification, Coming of Spring | Sacrificial goats/dogs, Februa (goatskin thongs) |
| Early Christianity (c. 3rd – 5th Cent. AD) | St. Valentine (of Rome/Terni), Emperor Claudius II, Pope Gelasius I | Christian Martyrdom, Defiance of Paganism | Hagiographies (saint’s lives), Feast Day declaration (496 AD) |
| High Middle Ages (c. 14th – 15th Cent.) | Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles d’Orléans, Margery Brews | Courtly Love, Mating Season of Birds | The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382), Manuscript Poems/Letters |
| Early Modern / Victorian Era (c. 18th – 19th Cent.) | Esther A. Howland, Richard Cadbury, George Whitney | Industrialization of Sentiment, Commercial Gift-Giving | Mass-produced paper valentines, “Fancy” heart-shaped chocolate boxes |
| Modern Era (20th – 21st Cent.) | Hallmark Corporation, Advertisers | Global Commercial Holiday, Expression of Affection | Greeting cards, Branded merchandise, Digital e-cards |
Chapter 1: Echoes from the Wolf-Cave: The Rites of Lupercalia
Long before any saint named Valentine was known, the middle of February in Rome was marked by a raw, chaotic, and deeply primal festival: Lupercalia.6
Celebrated annually on February 15, this ancient rite was a potent blend of purification and fertility, dedicated to Faunus, the horned god of the forest, plains, and fields, and inextricably linked to the city’s own foundational myth.8
The festival’s epicenter was the Lupercal, a sacred cave on the Palatine Hill where, according to legend, the infant twins Romulus and Remus—the founders of Rome—were suckled and saved by a she-wolf, or
lupa.8
This origin story imbued the festival with a profound civic and religious significance, connecting it directly to the city’s survival and virility.
The rituals of Lupercalia were a world away from modern romance, a spectacle of blood, sacrifice, and sanctioned violence.11
The festival began with the gathering of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, at the sacred cave.8
There, they would sacrifice a male goat, a potent symbol of fertility, and a dog, an animal associated with purification in the ancient world.9
What followed was a bizarre and singular ceremony: two young, noble Luperci were led to the altar, their foreheads touched with the blood-soaked sacrificial knife.
The blood was then immediately wiped away with a piece of wool dipped in milk, at which point the two young men were required to laugh aloud.9
This strange rite, with its juxtaposition of blood and milk, death and life, solemnity and laughter, underscored the festival’s focus on the cyclical forces of nature.
After a sacrificial feast, the festival erupted into the streets.
The Luperci, clad only in the skins of the sacrificed goats, or perhaps entirely naked, would cut thongs from the remaining hides.
These thongs were called februa, a word meaning “means of purification,” from which the month of February, Februarius, derives its name.7
Wielding these bloody strips of goatskin, the priests would run a course around the base of the Palatine Hill, striking any woman who came near them.6
Far from being an assault, this act was eagerly welcomed.
Roman women, including those of high rank, would purposely place themselves in the path of the Luperci, believing that a lash from the
februa would grant them fertility in the coming year and ease the pains of childbirth.8
A persistent modern myth suggests that Lupercalia also involved a sort of matchmaking lottery, where the names of young, unmarried women were placed in an urn for the city’s bachelors to draw, pairing them off for the year.1
While this detail adds a romantic flair that seems to prefigure Valentine’s Day, there is no evidence for it in any ancient source.
It appears to be a later embellishment, an attempt to find a more direct link between the pagan rite and the modern holiday.10
The Lupercalia festival was immensely popular and endured for centuries, surviving even the initial rise of Christianity.
Its final act came at the end of the 5th century.
In 494 or 496 AD, Pope Gelasius I, decrying the festival as a pagan and superstitious mockery, officially outlawed its celebration.9
In his condemnation, he scornfully suggested to the remaining Roman senators who defended the tradition, “If you assert that this rite has salutary force, celebrate it yourselves in the ancestral fashion; run nude yourselves that you may properly carry out the mockery”.10
Shortly thereafter, Gelasius established the Feast of Saint Valentine, to be observed on February 14th.16
Many historians believe this was a deliberate act of “Christianization”—a strategic move to supplant a popular pagan festival with a Christian one, thereby redirecting public devotion without creating a cultural vacuum.8
While direct proof of Gelasius’s intent is elusive, the proximity of the dates is highly suggestive.13
This transition marked more than a simple change on the calendar; it was a profound ideological shift.
It represented the replacement of a worldview centered on public, physical, and carnal ritual—focused on the tangible fertility of the community—with one centered on private, spiritual devotion to a martyred individual.
The holiday’s date, set in the middle of February, became the most tangible echo of its wild pagan past.
Chapter 2: The Shadow of a Saint: In Search of the Real Valentine
Having inherited the mid-February date from a defunct pagan festival, the newly minted Feast of St. Valentine faced a curious problem: its namesake was a ghost.
The identity of the saint himself was, and remains, a historical puzzle.
The name Valentine, derived from the Latin valens meaning “strong, worthy, or powerful,” was popular in late antiquity, and the Catholic Church today recognizes more than a dozen saints by that name.3
The historical record was so thin that even Pope Gelasius I, when establishing the feast day in 496 AD, conceded that the martyr’s acts were among those “being known only to God,” a tacit admission that his story was already lost to the mists of time.5
Out of this ambiguity, two primary candidates for the “real” St. Valentine emerge from hagiographical sources, though many scholars now believe they are likely different versions of the same man’s story.3
The first was a Roman priest named Valentine who was martyred around 270 AD during the persecutions under Emperor Claudius II Gothicus.13
The second was a bishop from the city of Interamna (modern Terni, Italy), who was also said to have been martyred under Claudius II outside Rome.8
The historical core is sparse but consistent: at least one devout Christian named Valentine met his end for his faith on February 14th and was buried on the Via Flaminia.3
This historical vacuum, however, proved to be not a weakness but a fertile ground for legend.
With no concrete biography to constrain them, later generations were free to project their own ideals of love, sacrifice, and heroism onto the blank slate of St. Valentine.
Over the centuries, a collection of romantic, albeit entirely apocryphal, stories blossomed around his name.
The most famous of these legends casts Valentine as a champion of love against tyrannical authority.
The story claims that Emperor Claudius II, believing that single men made better and more focused soldiers, outlawed marriage for young men to improve military recruitment.5
Valentine, a priest who saw the decree as unjust, defied the emperor and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.14
This tale paints him as a heroic defender of the sacred institution of marriage.
One charming embellishment to this legend claims that to remind these secretly married soldiers of their vows and of God’s love, Valentine would cut hearts from parchment and give them to the couples, providing a mythical origin for the heart symbol’s association with the day.17
Another powerful legend focuses on his time in prison.
In this telling, Valentine befriends his jailer, Asterius, and the jailer’s blind daughter, Julia.6
Through devout prayer, Valentine miraculously restores Julia’s sight, an act that leads to the conversion of the entire household to Christianity.13
The romantic climax of this tale occurs on the eve of his execution.
Valentine is said to have written a final farewell letter to Julia, signing it with the immortal phrase, “from your Valentine”.1
This story provides the purported origin of the first-ever “valentine” greeting.
While these tales are compelling, they are historical fictions.
There is no contemporary, 3rd-century evidence to support the stories of secret marriages or a farewell note to a jailer’s daughter.14
These narratives were woven centuries later, likely during the Middle Ages when the ideals of courtly love and chivalric romance were gaining cultural currency.
The historical reality is far more mundane.
In 1969, acknowledging the lack of reliable information and the overwhelming weight of legend, the Catholic Church removed St. Valentine’s feast day from the General Roman Calendar, the official schedule of liturgical celebrations.
He remains a recognized saint in the broader Roman Martyrology, but his official commemoration was demoted due to the historical uncertainty.3
Ultimately, the ambiguity of the historical Valentine was a crucial precondition for his transformation into a symbol of romance.
He became a vessel, filled with meaning by the cultural needs of subsequent eras, a figure whose legend proved far more powerful and enduring than the man himself.
Chapter 3: A Poet’s Dream: How Chaucer Forged a Day for Lovers
For nearly a millennium after Pope Gelasius I established the Feast of St. Valentine, the day passed with little fanfare.
It was simply one of many saints’ days on a crowded liturgical calendar, a minor commemoration of a martyr whose story was largely unknown.1
It held no special connection to love or romance.
In fact, as a feast day, it was overshadowed by more significant celebrations like Candlemas on February 2 and the carnivals leading up to Lent.18
The crucial link between St. Valentine and love was not forged by a pope, a saint, or a folk tradition, but by the pen of a poet.
The pivotal figure in this transformation was the father of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer.
In the late 14th century, Chaucer effectively invented the romantic holiday we know today, becoming what one scholar calls “the original mythmaker in this instance”.21
The scholarly consensus is clear: before Chaucer’s work, no known text in any language associated St. Valentine’s Day with lovers.21
The work that changed everything was Chaucer’s circa 1382 dream-vision poem, The Parliament of Fowls (also known as Parlement of Foules).21
The poem, comprising nearly 700 lines, describes the narrator falling asleep and dreaming that he is guided to a beautiful, lush garden.
There, on a hill of flowers, sits the goddess Nature, who has convened a great parliament of every species of bird.25
The purpose of this grand assembly is articulated in the poem’s most consequential lines:
“For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make”.8
In modern English: “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, / When every bird comes there to choose his mate.” With this couplet, Chaucer single-handedly established a new mythology for February 14th.
He connected the saint’s feast day with a popular medieval folk belief that birds began to pair off for the mating season in the middle of February.8
The poem itself is a sophisticated and often humorous exploration of love and courtship, framed within the conventions of medieval courtly love.29
The central plot revolves around a debate among three high-ranking male eagles, or tercels, who are all vying for the love of a beautiful female eagle, the formel.
Each pleads his case before the assembly, arguing his worthiness based on the depth and sincerity of his love.25
The debate becomes raucous as birds from lower social orders—representing different classes of English society—begin to chime in with their own comical and conflicting opinions.21
In a move that subverts the traditional courtly narrative, the goddess Nature does not force a decision.
Instead, she grants the female eagle’s request to have another year to make her choice, affirming the importance of free will in matters of the heart.21
The influence of The Parliament of Fowls was immense.
Chaucer was the most famous and respected poet of his age, and his work was widely read and circulated among the literate elite.
His poetic linking of St. Valentine’s Day with the pairing of birds provided a powerful, elegant, and secular rationale for celebrating love on that day—a rationale that had been missing for 900 years.
The idea was so compelling that it quickly took root in the cultural imagination.
Less than a century after Chaucer wrote his poem, real people were beginning to adopt the language, sending letters to their beloveds and referring to them as their “Valentine”.18
Chaucer’s genius was to perform a kind of cultural alchemy.
He took a minor, obscure religious feast and infused it with a new and potent purpose, one drawn not from hagiography but from the observable natural world and the fashionable literary ideals of his time.
He fundamentally shifted the holiday’s conceptual basis from pious martyrdom to secular romance, giving Valentine’s Day the romantic “why” that has defined it ever since.
Chapter 4: From Prison Towers to Parlors: The First Tangible Valentines
Geoffrey Chaucer had planted the seed of an idea; in the century that followed, it began to bear fruit in the form of tangible expressions of love.
The literary concept of Valentine’s Day as a time for choosing a mate began its crucial migration from the pages of poetry into the lived experiences and social practices of the European nobility.
This chapter in the holiday’s history is marked by the appearance of the first physical love notes, letters, and poems exchanged on February 14th.
The story of the very first valentine is often attributed to Charles, Duke of Orléans, in 1415.
The popular legend holds that Charles, captured at the bloody Battle of Agincourt and imprisoned in the Tower of London, wrote a poignant poem to his wife, Bonne of Armagnac, in which he calls her his “very gentle Valentine”.5
This image of a noble prisoner of war penning the world’s first valentine from a desolate cell is undeniably romantic and has been repeated for centuries.32
However, deeper historical and manuscript analysis reveals a more complex and less straightforward reality.
The famous poem that begins, “Je suis desja d’amour tanné / Ma tresdoulce Valentinee” (“I am already sick of love, / My very sweet Valentine”), was most likely not written in the Tower of London, but after Charles’s return to France decades later.34
Furthermore, it was not a personal love letter to his wife.
Instead, it was a courtly and rather formal poem written to excuse himself from a popular court game in which ladies and gentlemen were assigned a “valentine” for the year.
In the poem, the aging duke tells his assigned partner that he is too old and tired for such amorous pursuits.34
It was, in essence, an elegant “anti-valentine.”
Despite this correction, Charles, Duke of Orléans, remains a pivotal figure.
He was, in fact, a prolific writer of Valentine’s Day poetry—composing at least fourteen poems on the subject.34
During his long captivity in England, he wrote other, more somber poems that directly engaged with the Chaucerian theme.
In one, he describes waking on Valentine’s Day to the sound of birds choosing their mates, a joyous event that only highlights his own loneliness and grief over his deceased wife.34
These poems demonstrate how Chaucer’s idea was actively circulating and being elaborated upon within aristocratic literary circles.
While Charles’s famous verse may be misattributed, the honor of the oldest surviving valentine written in the English language belongs to a woman named Margery Brews.
In a 1477 letter to her fiancé, John Paston, she passionately addresses him as her “right well-beloved valentine”.18
The letter is a fascinating blend of affection and practicality, as Margery pleads with John not to abandon their engagement over a dispute about the size of her dowry.32
This document is invaluable because it shows the term “valentine” moving beyond poetry and courtly games into the realm of real-life correspondence about love, marriage, and money.
It is concrete proof that Chaucer’s literary invention had become a social reality.
From these early aristocratic letters, the practice of creating handmade valentines gradually evolved.
By the 17th and 18th centuries, these tokens of affection grew more elaborate.
They were no longer just handwritten notes but decorated sheets of paper embellished with romantic symbols like flowers, hearts, and intricate “love knots”—puzzles of folded paper and endless lines symbolizing eternal love.13
Some contained acrostics or rebuses (picture puzzles) for the recipient to solve.
These intimate creations were not sent through a formal post but were often slipped secretly under a lady’s door or left on her doorknocker.36
This tradition may also have been influenced by the German custom of exchanging
Freundschaftskarten, or friendship cards, on New Year’s Day and other occasions, which had a long history of its own.1
This period marks a critical cultural transition: the transformation of a poetic idea into a tangible social ritual, complete with its own material culture and customs.
Chapter 5: The Mother of the Valentine: Industry and Affection in America
As the 18th century drew to a close, the intimate tradition of the handmade valentine began to intersect with the forces of commerce.
In England, the first “mechanical” or commercially printed valentines appeared, produced from simple woodcuts or engravings and often colored by hand.37
These cards combined traditional symbols—Cupids, hearts, flowers—with simple, often clichéd verses.
For those who lacked poetic flair but still wished to pen their own notes, enterprising publishers produced “valentine writer” pamphlets.
These booklets, with titles like
The Young Man’s Valentine Writer (1797), offered a selection of sentimental verses for every occasion, helping tongue-tied lovers express their feelings.28
The true birth of the Valentine’s Day industry, however, took place across the Atlantic, driven by the vision of a single American woman.
In the 1840s, Esther A.
Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts, a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, became the undisputed “Mother of the Valentine” and a pioneer of female entrepreneurship.8
The story begins when Howland received an ornate, imported English valentine.
While beautiful, she was struck by the idea that she could create something far superior and, crucially, produce it domestically for the American market.8
Armed with supplies of fine paper, lace, and colorful floral illustrations (known as “scrap”) from her father’s stationery store, Howland created a dozen sample cards.40
Her innovation was not merely artistic; it was a revolution in process.
She organized an assembly line of female workers—friends and recent graduates—in the third floor of her family home.
Each woman was assigned a specific task: one would lay out the background, another would cut out the pictures, a third would paste them on, and so on.8
This system allowed for the efficient mass production of highly intricate, three-dimensional cards that retained a delicate, handmade quality.
Howland’s valentines were exquisite creations, minor works of art featuring layers of real lace, silk ribbons, and pop-up elements.8
They were also expensive luxury items, selling for as much as $35 at a time when a dollar was a significant sum.40
Her business was an immediate and staggering success.
An initial sales trip by her brother, who hoped to secure a few hundred dollars in orders, returned with over $5,000 worth—an immense sum for the time.39
At its peak, Howland’s New England Valentine Company was a thriving enterprise earning her as much as $100,000 a year.37
Esther Howland’s success effectively created the American Valentine’s Day card industry, capitalizing on the social customs of a growing middle class that embraced new rituals of courtship.41
The industry she founded soon expanded.
In 1881, her business was bought out by the George C.
Whitney Company.40
Whitney further industrialized the process, introducing cheaper paper and high-speed printing presses to make valentines accessible to people of all social classes.8
This mass market also spawned a darker, more satirical tradition: the “Vinegar Valentine.” These were cheap, crudely printed, and anonymous cards sent not to express love, but to mock and insult the recipient for their perceived flaws, targeting everyone from dandies and spinsters to various professions and ethnic groups.41
Despite this cynical offshoot, the sentimental valentine reigned supreme.
Esther Howland had transformed a personal craft into a sophisticated commodity, professionalizing sentiment and building an industry that perfectly captured the emotional and economic currents of Victorian America.
Chapter 6: The Heart-Shaped Box and the Hallmark Hegemony
While Esther Howland was building a paper empire in America, another entrepreneur in Britain was ensuring that Valentine’s Day would become inextricably linked with another indulgence: chocolate.
The key figure in this development was Richard Cadbury, of the famed British chocolate company.44
In the mid-19th century, the Cadbury company perfected a new technique for pressing cocoa butter from cacao beans, which resulted in a more palatable “eating chocolate” and a large surplus of the cocoa butter itself.45
Cadbury needed an innovative way to market these new chocolate creations.
His stroke of marketing genius came in the 1860s.
Recognizing the burgeoning popularity of Valentine’s Day as a gift-giving holiday, Cadbury designed the very first heart-shaped boxes for his chocolates, which he called “Fancy Boxes”.45
These were no mere containers.
The boxes themselves were works of art, lavishly decorated with images of Cupids and roses, often featuring reproductions of Cadbury’s own paintings.48
Crucially, he marketed the boxes as keepsakes.
Once the chocolates were eaten, the beautiful heart-shaped container could be used to store mementos, such as love letters or locks of hair.45
This brilliant fusion of product and packaging was an instant success, creating a tradition so powerful that the heart-shaped box of chocolates remains a quintessential Valentine’s gift over 150 years later.44
As the 20th century dawned, the commercialization of the holiday entered its final, industrial phase, led by the company that would become synonymous with the greeting card industry: Hallmark.
Founded by Joyce C.
Hall, the company that began as Hall Brothers started selling Valentine’s Day cards in 1913 and began printing its own in 1916, just as the American market for cards was exploding.18
Hallmark and its competitors, like the American Greetings Corporation, perfected the art of mass-market sentiment.
They utilized innovations in offset printing, die-cutting, and graphic design to produce a seemingly infinite variety of affordable cards for every conceivable relationship and tone—from passionate and romantic to friendly and humorous.1
This mass production cemented the greeting card as the central artifact of the modern Valentine’s Day celebration.
It became a social expectation, a low-stakes way for people to participate in the ritual of expressing affection.
The practice expanded far beyond romantic couples to include friends, family members, and, most significantly, classroom exchanges among schoolchildren, which became a rite of passage for generations of Americans.1
By the mid-20th century, Valentine’s Day had become the second-largest card-sending holiday of the year, surpassed only by Christmas.1
This journey culminates in the modern commercialized landscape, where Valentine’s Day is a major economic event promoted by advertisers months in advance.2
This has led to a perennial critique that the holiday has become overly commercial, creating social pressure and a sense of obligation that can overshadow genuine feeling.51
The emphasis on spending, some argue, correlates the value of a gift with the depth of one’s love, defeating the holiday’s purpose.52
Yet, this very commercialization is what allowed the holiday to achieve its enormous scale.
By democratizing the expression of affection, companies like Cadbury and Hallmark transformed Valentine’s Day from an elite literary tradition or a personal craft into an accessible, standardized, and universal ritual for the masses, solidifying its place as a pillar of the modern consumer calendar.
Conclusion: A Holiday of Our Own Making
In the final analysis, the question of who invented Valentine’s Day has no single answer, because the holiday was never truly invented.
It was assembled.
It is a cultural palimpsest, a document written and rewritten over nearly two millennia, with the faint traces of each previous layer still visible beneath the surface of the last.
Its history is not a straight line but a meandering path of appropriation, reinterpretation, and reinvention.
The chain of “invention” is a long and improbable one.
It begins with the date, a ghost of the Roman festival of Lupercalia, a violent and carnal rite of fertility whose only lasting contribution was its place on the calendar in mid-February.
This pagan date was co-opted by the early Church for a martyr’s feast day, though the martyr himself, Valentine, was so obscure that his story became a blank canvas.
Over the centuries, that canvas was filled with heroic legends of romantic defiance and tender farewells, myths created to give the saint a purpose worthy of a celebration.
For nine hundred years, however, that celebration lacked a central theme until Geoffrey Chaucer, in a stroke of poetic genius, dreamed up a parliament of birds choosing their mates on “Seynt Valentynes day.” He gave the day its romantic soul, a theme so powerful that it leaped from the page into the world.
Literate nobles like Charles d’Orléans and Margery Brews turned this literary concept into a social practice, exchanging the first notes and letters that called a beloved a “Valentine.”
From there, the forces of modernity took hold.
An entrepreneurial Victorian woman, Esther Howland, saw the potential in this sentimental exchange and, through the ingenuity of the assembly line, turned it into an American industry.
A visionary British chocolatier, Richard Cadbury, saw a marketing opportunity and encased his product in a heart-shaped box, forever wedding the holiday to confectionery.
Finally, corporate giants like Hallmark democratized the ritual, mass-producing affection and turning a day of love into a global economic powerhouse.
The enduring power and global appeal of Valentine’s Day lie not in its murky origins but in this remarkable capacity for adaptation.
It has been consistently and successfully reshaped to reflect the values, anxieties, and aspirations of the age—from physical fertility in ancient Rome, to the ideals of courtly love in medieval England, to the virtues of domestic sentiment in Victorian America, and to the pressures and pleasures of global commerce today.
The story of who invented Valentine’s Day is, ultimately, the story of ourselves—a reflection of our own evolving ideas about how, and why, we choose to celebrate love.
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