The History of Valentine's Day & Commentary

Valentine’s Day History
As the story goes, Emperor Claudius (of Rome) wanted to have a large army. However, many of the men did not volunteer to serve in this army. Claudius assumed it was because the young men were in love and had families that they did not want to serve. As a result, he made it illegal for men to marry. Valentine, the Roman priest, did not agree with the emperor’s decree and continued to marry couples in secret. One day, Valentine’s secret dealings were discovered. Valentine was captured and imprisoned. While incarcerated, many of the townspeople continued to express their support for Valentine through small acts such as throwing roses and notes into his cell window. One of Valentine’s major supporters during this time of imprisonment was the daughter of one of the prison guards. They talked regularly and encouraged each other. The day Valentine was scheduled to be beheaded, on February 14, 269 A.D., he left a note for the prison guard’s daughter. He signed the note "Love from your Valentine." http://www.pictureframes.co.uk/pages/saint_valentine.htm. This is one explanation of the origins of Valentine’s Day.
Another source explains that Valentine’s Day originated as the eve of the ancient Roman festival, Lupercalia. Lupercalia was an ancient pagan festival in honor of Lupercus, the Roman God of Fertility. The original festival was held on the 15th of February in the Lupercal, a cave where Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, were said to have been nurtured by a she-wolf. On this day, priest assemble at the cave and sacrifice goats and dogs—animals known for their strong sexual instinct- to the god of fertility. After the ceremony, the young Roman men would slice the goat's hide into strips, dip them in the sacrificial blood and run through the streets, slapping the women and the crops with them. Roman women liked being touched with the blood, goat hides because they believed that the strips would make them more fertile and make childbirth easier in the coming year.
As part of this pagan tradition, there was a lottery aspect to festival wherein the young women in the city would write their names on a piece of paper and place it in a big urn. Arbitrarily, the men would pick a woman's name and she would become his date for the remainder of the evening, typically the remainder of the year. These matches often ended in marriage. Over the years, the Catholic Church eventually substituted the names of women with the names of dead saints to shift the general population’s focus away from lustful, fleshly desires to more spiritual ones. Toward the end of the 5th century, Pope Galesius decided to dedicate the Eve of Lupercalia to the martyred Roman priest, Valentine.
Despite these efforts, the pagan ideals persisted as the British and French people recalled the ancient Roman traditions. Additionally, the bird mating season coincidentally began around the same date, February 14th. So February 14th continues to be a day associated with love, and its many different forms of expression. This is the history of Valentine as recorded on the following website: http://www.witchology.com/contents/february/valentines_static.php

Valentine’s Day Commentary
As I do customarily when researching a topic, I type the topic into Google. For this project, I typed “history of valentine” into Google and received results for about 4, 740,000 sites. So finding information on the history of Valentine’s Day was not difficult. The most difficult aspect of this research project was deciding where to start and where/when to end.
Since I am a firm believer in the idea that “Seeing History is Believing History”, I am usually hunting for pictures and videos of various historical events to bring into the classroom to supplement the textbook. For this reason, I clicked on “Images” on the Google screen to see if I could find something to help students visualize the history of Valentine’s Day.
The initial site was not wholly devoted to Valentine’s Day. The site is maintained in the United Kingdom. Although the homepage is actually about picture frames, there is a section on their site dedicated to the history of Valentine’s Day, the Valentine Story, and Valentine traditions. I assume the nice image that appeared on Google images was there promoting their frame, not really Valentine’s Day. Nevertheless, the site told the history of Valentine’s Day through the first person perspective, which I found interesting.
The second interesting Valentine’s Day image I found was a drawing of a she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. This photo led me to my second source entitled, www.witchology.com which is a website dedicated to the study of Witches and Witchcraft, a site maintained by Dr. Leo Ruickbie. This site traced the origins of Valentine’s Day back to the ancient Roman fertility festival called Lupecalia. Dr. Ruickbie’s site was given more credence because of his distinguished credentials. He obtained a Masters in Sociology and Religion from Lancaster University and became the first person to obtain a doctorate in Sociology of Modern Witchcraft. Furthermore, Dr. Ruickbie has published books, conducted public speaking engagements, been interviewed internationally, and was commissioned to conduct special research assignments by BBC.
Overall, I think the research was painless. However, I did verify the major components of the Valentine’s Day story against a couple other websites. The stories were consistent. I was satisfied.