Hagiography is a fascinating subject, and one in which I have done a certain amount of study. My favourite saints are the Celtic saints, those connected with Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall, and whose numbers are vast. Indeed, the number of Celtic saints would exceed all the rest of the saints in Christendom combined. A study of the saints of Cornwall alone, written some years ago by Sabine Baring-Gould, extended to four volumes, and a book of Irish saints which I have in my library states that there are in excess of three hundred Irish saints named St Colman. One could put together a nearly full calendar of saints' days consisting of nothing but St Colmans.

Of course very few of these Celtic saints actually existed, but despite that temporal disadvantage, they did lead beautiful lives, and performed many remarkable miracles.

St Valentine was not Celtic, but was a Roman martyr in the days of the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. There is some doubt about his authenticity, and he was one of the saints 'downgraded' by the Roman Catholic church in the modernist reformation of the calendar of saints in 1969. Other saints to suffer this fate were the popular St Philomena and St Christopher. I recall the outrage of Italian born Holllywood stars such as Sophia Loren, who seemed to believe that their lives while jetsetting around the world were suddenly in greater danger because the church had questioned the existence of the patron saint of travellers.

The importance of a saint however, has nothing to do with any judgment of the church. All of these saints are still popular, in fact Saints Christopher and Valentine are more popular than ever. What knowledge do we have then, about the life and martyrdom of St Valentine?

He was a priest or bishop of Rome, and possibly a physician as well, who helped Christians persecuted under the emperor Claudius II. He was caught, and, refusing to renounce his faith, was beaten, and finally beheaded on February 14. It is a peculiarity of saints' days that they celebrate the death of the saint (and therefore the saint's entry into heaven) rather than the birth of the saint. This was in about the year 270 A.D. when the modern calendar had been well established. The saint's relics are mainly found in the church of St Praxedes, although a church had been built in St Valentine's name by Pope Julius I, which has now vanished.

There is another St Valentine whose day is celebrated on February 14, and who was alive at about the same time, whose acta are very similar, and who was buried at about the same place, the Flaminian Way. It is obviously very likely that, if St Valentine existed at all, these two are one and the same. A third St Valentine died in Africa, and also has a February 14 feast day. Nothing else is known about him.

As I have suggested in my remarks about the Celtic saints, one of the most fascinating things about the study of saints is their sheer number, as well as their obscurity and the elements of fantasy and legend which surround them. These three are only the St Valentines celebrated on February 14. There are many other St Valentines in martyrologies, with feast days on different dates. One of the popes even styled himself Valentine: he was not a saint, but was Pope Valentine for about 40 days in 827. 'Our' St Valentine is mentioned as an illustrious martyr in many of the earliest martyrologies, including those of St Gregory, and the Venerable Bede.

A shrewd practice of the earliest Christian missionairies was to retain a popular pagan tradition under the umbrella of a Christian celebration. This is where the legends of most of the Celtic saints spring from. In pagan Rome, the Festival of Lupercia began on February 15, and February 14 was a holiday to celebrate the Goddess of women and marriage, Juno. On February 14 the pagan tradition was for boys to draw the names of girls out of a jar, and this girl would then be their partner for the length of the festival.

How were the early preachers of Christianity to get rid of this very popular and festive practice? Well, St Valentine's feast day was celebrated on February 14, and so he became the patron saint of love and lovers, of betrothed couples, and of young people and happy marriages. Once he was established in this role, other acretions of legend began to gather around his name: that he married couples in secret by the forbidden Christian rites, that he fell in love with his gaoler's daughter (and sent her a farewell note inscribed 'from your Valentine'), and that he cured the daughter of blindness. All of this is sheer nonsense of course, even within the beliefs of the traditional Catholic church.

Other notions are thought to have helped maintain the connection between St Valentine's feast day and young love. In the Middle Ages it was believed that birds began to pair on February 14. In Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Parliament of Foules' we find these lines: 

But there is more to St Valentine than just love: that was just a connection of convenience in any case. He is the patron saint of epileptics, and, like Julius Caesar, may have suffered from the ' falling sickness' himself. This is why epilepsy was once known as Valentine's sickness. He is also the patron saint of bee keepers, but I do not know the connection there.

His iconography is as follows: a bishop with a crippled or epileptic child at his feet, a bishop with a rooster nearby, a bishop refusing to adore an idol, a bishop being beheaded, a bishop overlooking a betrothed couple (see the stained glass window above), and a priest giving sight to a blind girl.

This February 14 I would like all my readers, male and female, to buy something beautiful and surprising for their partners.
Susan MacDonald

A sixteenth century Tyrolean painting of St Valentine. The picture is unclear at this small scale, but I think he is represented with an epilieptic at his feet.