Happy Valentine's Day!

Who was Saint Valentine? Nobody really knows very much about the Saints Valentine (there were about a dozen of them). The whole idea of romantic Valentine's day seems to have been invented by Geoffrey Chaucer¹ sometime around 1380.

It seems like people in England just wanted to enjoy a bit of debauchery fun on February 14th so they connected their frolics with a Roman Catholic saint in order to get the permission of the church! Pretty clever, eh?

---

1. Geoffrey Chaucer is my distant cousin by marriage [My Connection to Geoffrey Chaucer and Medieval Science ].