Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of additional tickets remain available at the door.
Profs and Pints Charlottesville presents: “The Ancient Origins of Valentine’s Day,” a look at the modern holiday’s roots in pre-Christian fertility rituals, Roman mythology, and tales told of a beheaded rebel saint, with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, professor of medieval literature at Longwood University.
Profs and Pints is coming to Charlottesville with a seasonal treat: A talk that will forever change how you think about Valentine’s Day. Its upcoming debut at the Graduate Charlottesville hotel will have you loving to learn and show you why Profs and Pints has built up big fan bases in other such as Richmond, Annapolis, and Washington D.C.
The speaker, Dr. Kat Tracy, is a medievalist has written extensively on saints’ lives and the synthesis of Christian and non-Christian traditions in medieval literature and culture. She’ll be serving up an assortment of lessons about the strange and dramatic origins of the upcoming holiday.
Professor Tracy will talk about how the celebration of love associated with Valentine has its roots in the pre-Christian Roman celebration of Lupercalia—the February 15th Festival of the Wolf—when certain young men ran naked through parts of the city and tapped women with goat-skin whips dipped in blood out of a belief it would make them fertile. Bet you aren’t expecting to see references to that in any Hallmark card!
Also in the mix is the ancient Irish festival of Imbolc, the February 1st halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox, marking the beginning of spring and the season of rebirth. Christians there transformed it into the feast of Saint Brigid, whose story has been found to share common traits with a pagan Irish goddess of the same name.
Of course, any discussion of Valentine’s Day needs to include a discussion of Saint Valentine, whose story is one of steadfast faith, resistance to violent tyranny, the performance of secret marriages, and death by torture and execution. His story was embellished with references to the Roman legends of Venus and Cupid, and his feast day first associated with rites of love, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century poem Parliament of Fowls, about the conquest of love between birds.
Pull it all together and you get a sense of how Saint Valentine’s Day, like many Christian holidays, incorporated earlier traditions and absorbed them, mixing a whole host of religious sentiments that evolved over centuries into a festival of love. The card publishers, chocolatiers, and florists took over from there. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later. Please allow yourself time to place any orders and get seated and settled in.)
Image: “Lupercalia,” a 1635 oil painting by Andrea Camassei (Museo del Prado / Wikimedia Commons).