A perennial favourite factoid within the medieval literary studies community is this: Geoffrey Chaucer “invented” Valentine’s Day. Inevitably wry smiles follow this suggestion, just as they do when it’s suggested that Chaucer “invented” a particular word. That’s just not how these things work, we quietly think to ourselves. That can’t be what happened. Can it?

The go-to book on this is Henry Kelly’s Chaucer and the Cult of Saint Valentine (1986), although to my knowledge no one has ever sought to massively revisit the topic. Kelly is justifiably wary of jumping to conclusions, but he argues that there is legitimate evidence to suggest that Chaucer really was the originator of the association of Valentine’s Day with courtship, and that several of scholarship’s alternative narratives (i.e. that the connection arose from a folk tradition) lack such support.

There are two poems in which Chaucer refers to Valentine’s Day, The Complaint of Mars (plausibly 1385) and The Parliament of Fowls (perhaps 1381–1382). It also gets a mention in the Complaynt D’amours, but this is less certainly attributed. The mention in Mars is fleeting, but certainly suggests that the matter of the poem (an ill-fated tryst) is appropriate to Valentine’s Day:

Seynt Valentyne, a foul thus herde I synge

Upon thy day er sonne gan up sprynge

Saint Valentine, I heard a bird sing thus,

Before the sun arose upon your day:

(The Complaint of Mars 13–14, quotation from the Riverside edition)

The Parliament of Fowls, on the other hand, is all about Valentine’s Day. It depicts a dream vision of a meeting of the entire kingdom of birds in the sight of Dame Nature, to witness the formel (adult female) eagle choose her mate, and then to choose their own. Nature says this of the occasion:

Ye knowe wel how, Seynt Valentynes day,

By my statut and thorgh my governaunce,

Ye come for to cheese – and fle youre wey –

Youre makes, as I prike yow with plesaunce;

You know well that on Saint Valentine’s day, by my order and rule, you come to choose (then fly your way!) your mates, because I prick you with desire.

(The Parliament of Fowls 386–9)

The idea seems to have quickly taken hold in English courtly culture – somewhat strangely, we have more evidence of people associating Valentine’s Day with courtship than of them reading The Parliament of Fowls, which survives in just fourteen manuscripts all from after Chaucer’s death in 1400 (Caxton later printed it, however, and Caxton had more success than most printers in anticipating what would sell). Within Chaucer’s own lifetime his contemporaries Gower and Grandson make the connection, and so Kelly discusses these, but the idea was also taken up in the fifteenth century by Charles D’Orleans, John Lydgate and Osbern Bokenham. The word “valentine” quickly gains the meaning of “mate” or “beloved”, separate from reference to the saint. Strikingly, there are even non-poetic references in some Norwich documents (1415) and one of the Paston letters (1477) to the notion that Valentine’s Day is when birds choose their mates.

There’s something not quite right here, however, and the solution is the most noteworthy aspect of Kelly’s book. February isn’t the right time for courtship in the poetic conventions of the late fourteenth century, nor could the Saint Valentine of February 14th really drive away the winter as Chaucer says in The Parliament of Fowls (February remaining quite cold in England). Chaucerian references to the months have March as cold and dry, April as warm and wet (famously in The Canterbury Tales the April sun “prikketh fressh corages”), and May (in Troilus and Criseyde and elsewhere) as the time of courtship and of consummation. What Kelly observes is that there is a rather more obscure Saint Valentine (a bishop of Genoa) whose feast day fell on May 2nd or May 3rd, and it is almost certainly this saint to whom Chaucer refers. Even Gower and Grandson, Kelly notes, seem to make the confusion with the much more well-known but less appropriate February 14th Valentine; Chaucer may perhaps have had some familiarity with the Genoese saint from his reading of Italian literature, or from his travels to Italy on diplomatic work in the 1360’s (though this need not have been the case). Subsequent confusion seems to have cemented the idea; a date Chaucer picked simply to indicate the start of May was transformed into a mid-February festival of love.

Of course there’s a lot more to this question than just the confused origins of the date; hopefully someone else will be able to elucidate exactly what happened to Saint Valentine’s Day in the intervening centuries.