It seems that Chaucer’s poems in the “Congress of the Crowd” refer to an ancient tradition, but in reality there is no indication of such tradition before. The explanation of ancient customs such as historical events originated in eighteenth-century archeology, in particular Alban Butler, author of the book “The Lives of the Saints of Butler”, and was Venerable modern scholar passed down. Most notably “the idea that Valentine’s Day originating from the Roman feast of Lupercalia has been accepted without criticism and repeated, in various forms, to this day”.
There are three other authors who also wrote poems about couples on St. Valentine’s Day in the same year: Otton de Grandson from Savoy, John Gower from England, and a knight called Pardo from Valencia. Chaucer is probably the most prominent, but due to the lack of data to verify with medieval writings, we cannot know for sure who out of the four was the first idea and influenced the others.
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