Valentine History, and antique Valentines.

     I recently made a PowerPoint presentation on the history of Valentines and Saint Valentine's Day, which I associate with a presentation of my collection of antique Valentines. I also included some Love stamps and covers as well as stamps with hearts on them from other countries. I presented this to the Milwaukee Philatelic Society meeting last week. I think everyone enjoyed it. I certainly do have a huge collection of antique Valentines.
     I have tried to figure out how to get this Power Point presentation on my blog. I transferred the presentation to Word to make handouts and then tried to load that presentation onto this blog site but it would not transfer. No specific error message, just said it could not be uploaded. Does anyone know how to do this? Please send me a comment or an email if you know. Meanwhile I am just going to transfer a few of the pictures and some of the write up. Since some are notes from my powerpoint presentation and some are the slides themselves, they are going to have various fonts and formats. I hope this is not too distracting and if so I apologize.

Antique Valentines

      Wikipedia says that Valentine's Day was originally set to honor several possible Christian martyrs that were named Valentine. It is widely assumed that the linkage of St. Valentine's Day to romantic love occurred in the 14th century when Chaucer seemed to refer to it in some of his writing. However the spelling in Chaucer's verse, given its origin in Old English, may not refer to Valentine's Day. Shakespeare in the 16th century definitely refers to St. Valentine's Day as a celebration of romantic love, and refers to someone being a Valentine in Ophelia. It was not until the late 18th century and early 19th century that valentine cards began to be sent as indications of affection.