Valentine Day Gift: From Chaucer to Chocolate, how Valentine’s Day gifts have changed over the centuries – from chaucer to chocolate how gifts have been changed over the centuries

Melbourne: The practice of giving gifts on the occasion of Valentine’s Day is very old. For hundreds of years people have been celebrating this day and giving gifts as an expression of love. In this context, let us first talk about the 14th century poet, civil servant and curious European traveller, Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer’s poem from the 1380s, The Parliament of Fouls, is believed to be the first reference to February 14 as a day of love. The day was formerly the feast of the Roman martyr Saint Valentine, but Chaucer described it as a day for people to choose their lovers. He knew that it was easier said than done. The poem’s narrator is unsuccessful in love, frustrated that life is so short and how long it takes to learn to love well in comparison. He falls asleep and dreams of a garden in which all the different birds of the world are gathered.

Nature explains to the assembled herd that they have come to choose their mates according to her rules on Valentine’s Day like every year. But this process causes confusion and debate. The birds can’t agree on what it means to follow his rules because they all value different things in their partners. As today, in Chaucer’s time the giving of gifts was a big ritual and a sign of intention and commitment. In Old and Middle English the word “vade” was used to mean a guarantee of a promise. In the 13th century it came to mean “marriage” or a marriage ceremony.

Valentine Day Gift: Thugs have become active on the pretext of giving gifts, be careful otherwise this can happen.

how-to gift

This same period saw marriage being Christianized and transformed into an unbreakable commitment (a sacrament of the Church). New traditions of love developed in songs, stories and other forms of art. These conventions influenced broader cultural notions of emotion: love letters were written, grand acts of service were celebrated, and symbols of love were given. Rings, brooches, girdles (belts), gloves, gauntlets (sleeves), handkerchiefs or other personal garments, combs, mirrors, purses, boxes, utensils and pictures – and even fish – were among the romantic gifts given in the late Middle Ages. As seen in the records.

In stories, gifts can be imbued with magical powers. In his 13th-century History of the World, Rudolf von Ems recorded how Moses, when forced to return home and leave his first wife, Tharbis, an Ethiopian princess, made two rings. The ring he gave to Therbis was to make her forget him. He always wore the second ring so that its memory was always fresh in his mind. Outside of stories, gifts can have legal significance: the wedding ring, which has been important since the 13th century, can prove that a marriage took place with the intention and consent of the giver and recipient.

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art of love

Like Chaucer, 20th-century German psychologist Erich Fromm thought that people could learn the art of loving. Fromm thought that love was not only an act of giving material things, but also associated with one’s pleasure, interest, understanding, knowledge, humor, and sadness. While these gifts may take some time and practice, there are more straightforward ideas from history. Manufactured cards have dominated since the Industrial Revolution, replacing other traditional gifts such as flowers, jewellery, intimate apparel and consumables (now more often chocolate than fish). All can be personalized for that intimate touch. Of course, there are strange examples of love gifts, such as when Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton exchanged rosaries containing silver pendants that were smeared with each other’s blood.

Artist Dora Maar was so upset when her notoriously bad lover, Pablo Picasso, complained that she had given away one of his paintings in exchange for a ruby ​​ring to give him, she promptly threw the ring into the Seine. Picasso immediately gave her a second ring which appears in Mar’s portrait. A good gift given as an expression of love can long live the emotion it was given: a flower pressed into a book, a trinket at the bottom of a box, a faded card or A soulful song that takes you back to those good old days. In this way, the meaning of gifts can change as they become just a memory and time goes on.