Medieval Lover, Modern Martyr: Celebrating St. Dwynwen

While Valentine’s Day is still weeks away, Wales celebrates lovers with St. Dwynwen’s Day (in Welsh, Dydd Santes Dwynwen) on January 25th. The tradition similarly invites exchanges of cards, flowers, and heart-shaped gifts as expressions of love and affection. The holidays also share medieval origins, but St. Dwynwen’s Day derives from a darker story. 

Modern rendering of St. Dwynwen, Patron Saint of Love. (Artist and date unknown.)

As a Chaucerian, I am always delighted to share that the earliest association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love in English literature appears in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules – that is, Parliament of Fowls or, more plainly, Parliament of Birds.[1] The dream-vision poem, written in Middle English between 1381 and 1382, describes the speaker’s encounter with a congregation of birds who come together on St. Valentine’s Day to select their mates:

For this was on Seynt Valentynes Day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,
Of every kynde, that men thynke may;  
And that so huge a noyse gan they make
That erthe and see, and tree, and every lake
So ful was that unethe was there space
For me to stonde, so ful was al the place (Chaucer 309-15).[2]

[For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day when every bird of every type that one can imagine comes to choose his mate, and they made a huge noise, and the earth and sea and trees and every lake are so full of birds that there was hardly any space for me to stand because the entire place was filled with them.]  

In Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules, three tercels, or male eagles, make their cases to take a formel, or female eagle, as their mate. None are successful, and the female eagle remains solitary, as she desires, for another year. Medieval bestiaries associate the eagle with acute eyesight and note its ability to see fish from far above the sea. Entries also describe how when the eagle grows old, it flies upward toward the sun, so the sun’s rays remove the cloudiness from its eyes, and then plunges downward into a pool of water, where the bird dips itself three times to renew both its vision and its plumage. The above illumination, which references the eagle’s sight and its rejuvenation process, comes from The Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1511, f. 74r.

That the mating activity of the birds takes place on the medieval feast day of St. Valentine is not entirely coincidental, nor is it exactly a correlation of St. Valentine’s Day with romantic love as we recognize it today. In the Middle Ages, birds were believed to form breeding pairs in mid-February, so the date simply makes sense. At the same time, Chaucer’s pairing of the birds in a beautiful garden during springtime recreates the setting for courtly love typical of medieval romance narratives. Now, of course, the notion of romantic love resounds through any mention of the word valentine.

Like so many other martyrs, the story of St. Valentine is not as pretty as the poem that ascribed hearts and flowers to his namesake. He was executed by beating and beheading on orders from the Roman emperor Claudius II on February 14 in 270 AD. Two centuries later, the date of St. Valentine’s martyrdom became the date of his annual feast day, the date to which Chaucer refers in his poem. From the late Middle Ages onward, Valentine’s Day has been synonymous with romantic love, somewhat regardless of St. Valentine’s circumstances.

Manuscript illumination depicting the beheading of St. Valentine, circa 1335, from Bibliotheque Nationale de France MS Arsenal 5080, f. 197.

The tale of St. Dwynwen, from which the lesser-known Welsh celebration of lovers derives, departs markedly from both the martyrdom of St. Valentine and the light-hearted poem that set his feast day’s romantic tradition in motion. There are several variations of her story, all of which date Dwynwen, or Dwyn, to the 5th century as the daughter of a semi-legendary Welsh king.

The National Museum of Wales describes Dwynwen as the loveliest of King Brychan Brycheiniog’s 24 daughters, who fell in love in Maelon Dafodil. But her father betrothed Dwynwen to another man, and when Maelon learned that Dwynwen could not be his, he became enraged. He raped Dwynwen and abandoned her.

Distraught, Dwynen ran to the woods and pleaded with God to make her forget Maelon, then fell asleep. An angel came to Dwynwen, delivering a drink that erased her memories of Maelon and transformed him into ice. God then granted Dwynwen’s three wishes: that Maelon be thawed, that she never be married, and that God grant the wishes of true lovers. As a mark of gratitude, Dynwen dedicated herself to God and spent the rest of her days in his service.[3]  

The remains of St. Dwynwen’s church on the island of Llanddwyn, off the coast of Anglesey. On the same island, a well dedicated to St. Dwynwen is supposed to be home to a sacred fish, whose movements predict the futures of lovers. If the water boils, it is said to be a good omen for those who witness it.  Photo credit: Well Hopper, a website dedicated to “exploring the ancient holy wells and healing wells of North Wales” and which explores Llannddwyn Island at length.

The details of what transpired between Dwynwen and Maelon differ. Some versions of the story say that Dwynwen refused Maelon’s sexual advances, which resulted in her rejection but not her rape. The entry on Dwynwen in the Iolo Manuscripts: A Selection of Ancient Welsh Manuscripts, states that “Maelon sought her in unappropriated union, but was rejected; for which he left her in animosity, and aspersed her.”[4] Other versions say that Dwynwen was in love with Maelon but did not want to marry him because she wanted to become a nun, or was forbidden to marry him and became a nun; they do not say that she was raped. But Maelon’s anger appears across her story’s retelling, often accompanied by allusions to its physical manifestation – for example, “Maelon was furious, taking out his anger on Dwynwen.”[5]

When it comes to romantic love, Dwynwen does not thrive in her endeavors; instead, she tends to suffer in her story, typically at the hands of men. Indeed, the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, writing during the 14th century, remarks upon how Dwynwen was “afflicted yonder by wretched wrathful men.”[6] Often it is the very man who is supposed to love her who inflicts her suffering.  

St. Dwynwen is not a martyr in the traditional sense. In short, she does not meet her demise, like St. Valentine does, as a result of her religious beliefs. She does, however, ask God to absolve her of any memories of the man she loves, and by sacrificing this part of herself, she secures a blessing for lovers in return. Despite its darkness, perhaps St. Dwynwen’s story does not seem so strange an impetus for a lovers’ celebration after all.

Dwynwen suffers. She survives. She’s sainted. Certainly, she deserves as much recognition as a bunch of birds.

Emily McLemore, Ph.D.
Department of English
University of Notre Dame


[1] Valentine, n. Oxford English Dictionary.

[2] Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules, The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson, Houghton, 1987.

[3] St Dwynwen’s Day, National Museum of Wales, accessed 20 Jan. 2023.  

[4] Iolo Manuscripts: A Selection of Ancient Welsh Manuscripts, translated by Taliesin Williams, The Welsh MSS. Society, 1888, p. 473.

[5] Santes Dwynwen, Welsh Government, accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

[6] Iolo Manuscripts, p. 473.

Chaucer and Boccaccio: Anxiety of Influence?

Trecento Italy saw the “three crowns” of literature—Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio—whose contribution to Italian and European literature was immense and lasting. The literary communication between Italy and England of that century is a fascinating topic for historians, literary scholars, and common readers. In this piece of writing, we shall take a quick look into Chaucer’s possible “indebtedness” to Boccaccio, arguably the writer who is most like Chaucer among the three crowns of Trecento Italian literature.

Among the three writers, Boccaccio was arguably the one to whom Chaucer had the most natural affinity. They might have even met personally when both were in Florence in 1378, but sadly no evidence was found to prove it. On Chaucer’s second visit to Italy, he brought back copies of Boccaccio’s two great Italian poems, the Filostrato and the Teseida, which provided source material and inspiration for Chaucer’s own writings. In the House of Fame, the poetic invocations (II. 518-22) echo Teseida and several lines from Anelida and Arcite (1-21) are quite literal translations from the same work. Twelve stanzas from Teseida are adapted in the Parliament of Fowls (211-94) and Teseida also notably provides the plot for “The Knight’s Tale.” In “The Knight’s Tale,” Arcite calls himself “Philostrate”, literally the one “vanquished by love,” echoing the title of the poem Filostrato by Boccaccio.

Although direct borrowings are hard to prove, there are similarities and parallels between Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione and Chaucer’s House of Fame, between Boccacio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. For modern readers, the latter comparison is very intriguing, not just because of the two works’ literary achievement and popularity, but also because their shared structure of “framed story” and possibly shared aim of depicting (and even healing) human society through the act of “group story-telling.” Notably, the famous Italian writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini has adapted these two works (Il Decameron 1971 and  I racconti di Canterbury 1972), along with the  A Thousand and One Nights ( Il fiore delle Mille e una Notte 1974) in his Trilogy of Life movie series, with the intention of presenting the scope of the human world and the depth of humanity on the screen. As for the literary indebtedness, “The Franklin’s Tale” is generally accepted as being inspired from the fifth story of Day Ten in the Decameron as well as by the passage on the question of love in Filocolo (IV. 31-4).

Despite the affinity, similarity, and inter-texuality, Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio by name in his works (as a contrast, Chaucer mentions both Petrarch and Dante several times), nor does he mention Boccaccio’s works explicitly, which leads to the usual suspicion that Chaucer is under “the anxiety of influence.” However, we should remember that medieval authors had a different understanding of concepts like “plagiarism,” “adaptation” or “influence.” While literary scholars and historians are still trying hard to find evidence, more efforts should be given to the parallel reading of the two works, the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales—not just because it is almost a blank field to be explored, but also because it is pure pleasure to read them side by side!

Xiaoyi Zhang
PhD Candidate
University of Notre Dame