St Valentine and the Martyrologium Hieronymianum

Wikipedia is a fertile source of fake history.  Reading the article about St Valentine, I came across the following claim:

However, there is a reference to his feast day on 14 February in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum,^[19] which was compiled between 460 and 544 from earlier local sources.

This appears around the web, as evidence that the feast day of St Valentine is attested as 14 February in the late 5th century.  That in turn then feeds into the huge, crude falsehood that Pope Gelasius I abolished the Lupercalia in 496, substituting St Valentine’s Day instead. In fact nothing of the sort is recorded in any ancient source.  In an older post I went through all the early sources for St Valentine here.

But what is the Martyrologium Hieronymianum anyway?  (It has the reference number CPL 2031) Well, it is a Latin list of dates on which certain martyrs are commemorated, with a preface supposedly by St Jerome – in fact not so – and which exists in a number of copies of the 8th century, which differ considerably.  Unfortunately it is also one of those annoying “texts” that does not really exist as a single item.

This happens a fair bit with certain genres of non-literary text.  Lawbooks, and church service books, and manuals of agriculture are not really books.  They are not literary texts, admired for themselves.  They are tools.  They are sources of information, which are inevitably updated in every copy with local information.  Consequently any discussion of them becomes a discussion of specific manuscript copies which still exist.  No two of these are alike.  But they tend to be grouped as examples of such and such a text.

Martyrologies are books of precisely this kind, constantly amended and evolved.  So there is no “Martyrologium Hieronymianum” as such.  What we have is a number of physical copies of a martyrology, attributed to Jerome in its varying prefaces, containing often similar lists of saints and dates; and often different ones.  The edition by de Rossi in the Acta Sanctorum for November, vol. 2, part 1, resorts to parallel columns, each derived from one of three manuscripts.  Here is p.20, with the entry for 14 Feb.

There we have it.  Valentine appears in just one of the three manuscripts, the “codex Epternacensis” – from Echternach -, which De Rossi tells us has the modern shelfmark Paris. BNF lat. 10837.  I learn from Lapidge, The Roman Martyrs, p.649 n. 3 that it is from the start of the 8th century AD.  I learn from Delahaye’s Commentarius Perpetuus in the Acta Sanctorum for November 2.2, p.92, that

…martyrologii contextus miserum in modum corruptus est et perturbatus…

… the order of the martyrology has been miserably corrupted and disturbed…

Which pretty much sums up what we see on the page.

The Echternach manuscript is online, and may be found here.  On folio 6v is our entry:

All well and good, except… this is not a manuscript of the 5th century.  It’s an 8th century manuscript.  The other two are both 9th century.  All three contain long lists of Gaulish saints, from which scholars infer that the ancestor of them all was at least significantly revised in Gaul at the end of the 6th century, around 592.

It has been argued that the base text in fact derives from Northern Italy, between 430-450 AD, and is based on three sources, none of which mention St Valentine: the Depositio Martyrum in the Chronography of 354; a Greek martyrology extant in Syriac translation dating to 411 AD, and a supposed ancestor of the Kalendarium Carthaginense, written between 505-535.

The value of these arguments must be evaluated by others, but what matters here is that, even by the 8th century, when the cult of St Valentine of Interamna (=Terni) was well established, only a single manuscript mentions it, and that only as part of a series of martyrs.  It cannot sensibly be supposed that this martyr was in the “original” text, whenever that was written.  If it had been in the supposed Italian base text, or even in the Gallic revision of 592, it would certainly be present in all three witnesses.

So the Martyologium Hieronymianum is of no value as a guide to when the cult of St Valentine was first established.  It certainly does not show, as Wikipedia would have us believe, that this cult was known in the 5th century AD.