Part Three
Portrait of the trial of St. Valentine circa 260 AD by Bart Zeitblom.Hulton Archive
The feast day’s earliest associations with love and fertility may have been inherited from the pagan festival of Lupercalia, which was celebrated by the ancient Romans between Feb. 13 and Feb. 15. A matchmaking lottery would pair men and women up for the duration of the festival, and the men would slap women with the hides of goats and dogs they had sacrificed, which was thought to make the women fertile, historian Noel Lenski has told NPR. It’s thought that Pope Gelasius I established the feast of Saint Valentine in the fifth century to “Christianize” the festival.
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