Valentine's Day, February 14, is a day consecrated by custom to the celebration of romantic love. The observance dates back to medieval times but, in twentieth-century America, Valentine's Day—like other occasions that are linked to sentiment, such as Mother's Day—has become a ritual appendage of consumer culture. Attempts to link Valentine's Day and its emphasis on worldly love to an early martyr (or pair of martyrs) of the Christian church have been discredited, and historians have come to attribute the connection between romance and February 14 to Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400), the English poet and author of The Canterbury Tales.

In his work The Parliament of Foules, Chaucer wrote: "For this was Seynt Valentyne's Day. When every foul cometh ther to choose his mate." Throughout the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, Valentine's Day was an occasion for declaring one's affections...