21 Facts About Saint Valentine

Saint Valentine is a patron saint of Terni, epilepsy and beekeepers.

Relics of him were kept in the Church and Catacombs of San Valentino in Rome, which "remained an important pilgrim site throughout the Middle Ages until the relics of St Saint Valentine were transferred to the church of Santa Prassede during the pontificate of Nicholas IV".

Saint Valentine's skull, crowned with flowers, is exhibited in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome.

Saint Valentine does not occur in the earliest list of Roman martyrs, the Chronography of 354, although the patron of the Chronography's compilation was a wealthy Roman Christian named Valentinus.

Saint Valentine's body was hastily buried at a nearby cemetery and a few nights later his disciples retrieved his body and returned him home.

The name "Saint Valentine" derived from valens, was popular in Late Antiquity.

About eleven other saints with the name Valentine are commemorated in the Catholic Church.

Saint Valentine was sent to the prefect of Rome, to the emperor Claudius Gothicus himself.

An embellishment to this account states that before his execution, Saint Valentine wrote a note to Asterius's daughter signed "from your Valentine", which is said to have "inspired today's romantic missives".

Jacobus makes a play with the etymology of "Saint Valentine", "as containing valor".

Alongside a woodcut portrait of Saint Valentine, the text states that he was a Roman priest of exceptional learning who converted the daughter of Asterius and forty-nine others to Christianity before being martyred during the reign of Claudius Gothicus.

One is that in the 3rd century AD it is said that Saint Valentine, who was a priest, defied the order of the emperor Claudius and secretly performed Christian weddings for couples, allowing the husbands involved to escape conscription into the pagan army.

The account mentions that in order "to remind these men of their vows and God's love, Saint Valentine is said to have cut hearts from parchment", giving them to these persecuted Christians, a possible origin of the widespread use of hearts on St Valentine's Day.

Saint Valentine was venerated no more than other Christian martyrs and saints.

Saint Valentine was in the General Roman Calendar for celebration as a simple feast until 1955, when Pope Pius XII reduced all such feasts to just a commemoration within another celebration.

Saint Valentine's commemoration was still in the 1962 Roman Missal and is thus observed by those who, in the circumstances indicated in Pope Benedict XVI's 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, use that edition.

English 18th-century antiquarians Alban Butler and Francis Douce, noting the obscurity of Saint Valentine's identity, suggested that Saint Valentine's Day was created as an attempt to supersede the pagan holiday of Lupercalia.

Oruch charges that the traditions associated with "Saint Valentine's Day", documented in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parlement of Foules and set in the fictional context of an old tradition, did not exist before Chaucer.

Saint Valentine argues that the speculative explanation of sentimental customs, posing as historical fact, had their origins among 18th-century antiquaries, notably Alban Butler, the author of Butler's Lives of Saints, and have been perpetuated even by respectable modern scholars.

The flower-crowned alleged skull of St Saint Valentine is exhibited in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome.

St Saint Valentine's remains are deposited in St Anton's Church, Madrid, where they have lain since the late 1700s.