Erotic Horror: The Lie of Courtly Love on Mosher Mag

Desire in chains, longing like a knife. Love songs written in blood. And women, always on the pedestal, always in the cage.

We’re told that the Middle Ages were full of chastity belts and arranged marriages. Of holy vows and wifely submission. Of stone towers and cold beds and lords who barely looked at their wives. And yet, somewhere inside this gray, sexless tapestry, courtly love bloomed like a bruise.

But don’t be fooled. It wasn’t sweet.

Courtly love was not a fairytale. It was eroticism weaponised. Obsession wrapped in poetry. It was men yearning for women they could never have, and women trapped inside fantasies not their own. It was denial as art form. Desire as disease. A hunger that could only be dignified through distance.

It was, in short, beautifully monstrous.

Courtly love, or fin’amor, emerged in the 12th-century in the Occitan-speaking regions Southern France, namely the courts of Aquitaine, Toulouse, and Provence. The troubadours, poetic aristocrats and knight-musicians, began writing songs not to their wives, but to unattainable noblewomen. Usually married, often indifferent, and always just out of reach.

These women, due to their status, could not return affection without consequence. So the troubadour knight would adore her from afar.

He would fight for her honour. He would fall ill with desire. He would become a better man, a holier man, through his self-denial.

Desire was allowed to exist, but only if it remained unfulfilled.

The result?

A system in which the performance of love replaced real intimacy.

A system that demanded endless suffering from men, and perfect stillness from women.

Women weren’t partners. They were stages.

And the performance was always for someone else.

The dynamic was precise:

He: the suffering knight, the servant of love, begging for crumbs of attention.

She: the lady on the pedestal, pure and untouchable, a cold moon lighting his torment.

This was not love as fulfillment. This was love as a wound.

And it caught fire.

Love in this system was deliberately cruel.

Andreas Capellanus, a 12th-century writer, codified this obsession in his Art of Courtly Love. He instructed men to pursue married women, to confess feelings they were forbidden to act on, to become love's martyr.

Women, meanwhile, were instructed to reject advances, not because they didn’t want them, but because that made the man want harder.

No wasn’t just no. It was the point.

Jealousy was encouraged. Adultery was reframed as noble suffering. Virginity wasn’t just protected, it was worshipped from afar, as if the purity of the woman heightened the agony of the man.

It was a tightrope. You could love her. You could die for her. You could write sonnets and go to war and fast for a week in her honour.

It was emotional waterboarding. Desire was stretched, starved, made sacred.

And if love was consummated? The spell was broken. The woman would fall from the pedestal. The longing would evaporate. The man might even leave, off to pine for someone new.

A real woman, one with opinions, wants, and flaws, could never compete with the phantom lover constructed in his poems.

So he loved the ghost of her.

Not the body. Not the person. The fiction.

This wasn’t romantic. It was erotic horror, he slow suffocation of desire, the refusal to let it breathe.

The ladies in these stories were not lovers. They were gods. Prizes. Ghosts. They were used as mirrors for male devotion. Their humanity, their desires, pain, and complexity, rarely mattered.

In this system, a woman’s worth increased in direct proportion to how little she gave. A good Lady was cold. She punished. She teased. She was the beloved tormentor. She was responsible for maintaining his madness. And if she ever showed warmth, if she ever wanted him back, the game ended. Her value plummeted.

A woman was supposed to be an idea, not a human being.

No menstrual blood. No ugly crying. No bad sex. No boredom. No grief. Just a tight-laced symbol in a window, being yearned for until the knight lost his mind or his sword, whichever came first.

To be adored in courtly love was to be erased.

Loved to the point of nonexistence.

Worse, this ritualised yearning gave men cultural permission to project their fantasies onto women without ever engaging with them as equals. To love without consent. To suffer as virtue. To pursue as performance.

It’s not unlike the modern "Nice Guy" trope. The man who believes his emotional devotion entitles him to the woman he longs for. Only in courtly love, his unfulfilled desire was seen as moral, even holy.

He was "suffering," after all. And suffering makes saints.

Courtly love was medicalised, literally.

Doctors diagnosed men with amor hereos, or “love sickness.”

Symptoms included weight loss, hysteria, insomnia, nosebleeds, vomiting, and hallucinations. Men were said to faint at the mere sight of their beloved.

Poets called love a wound bleeding, festering, incurable.

But the cure? It was never her love. That would ruin it.

The cure was suffering itself. The act of longing became the virtue.

It was sadomasochism disguised as grace.

Pain with a halo. Celibacy with a hard-on.

And if this sounds erotic, it is.

Just ask Lancelot, who writes Guinevere’s name in blood. Or Tristan, who drinks the love potion with Isolde and is damned by it forever. Or Dante, who wrote three books about Beatrice and barely interacted with her in life.

These were not loves. They were addictions. Ritualised madness.

Make no mistake: courtly love was horny.

Knights weren’t serenading these women out of pure spiritual longing. There was tension, sweat, dreams soaked with guilt.

They fought in tournaments wearing their lady’s token, a scarf, a ring, a sleeve. They penned verses about lips they would never kiss.

Some accounts describe knights carving their lady’s name into their own flesh.

These were not love stories. These were slow-motion crucifixions.

And yet the entire system was designed to never deliver a climax. This was edgeplay, 12th-century style. Longing made sublime because it remained forever unfulfilled.

Love as torment. Love as spectacle. Love as eternal denial.

Courtly love, despite its obsession with heterosexual order, created unexpected cracks in its own foundations.

The emphasis on secrecy, longing, and sublimation lent itself to queer expression, especially among cloistered women and monastic men.

In convents and courts, we find letters between women using courtly love language.

“I burn for you,” “my heart lies prostrate before yours.”

Among the troubadours were female poets (trobairitz) who flipped the script and sang of desiring men, or in rare cases, other women.

But even in these subversive forms, the structure was still laced with the same rot: desire as deprivation. Sex as silence.

Even queer longing, when filtered through the courtly lens, became tragic, impossible, holy only when denied.

Think it died in the dark ages? Look again.

The tropes of courtly love are everywhere:

The emotionally tortured man who longs from afar. The “perfect” woman who exists to inspire, not speak. The idea that suffering for love is noble. The idea that unrequited love is more powerful than mutual passion.

From Mr. Darcy to Edward Cullen, the haunted, lovesick male persists. So does the woman-as-object, still silent, still idealised, still existing in orbit around male devotion.

Even in modern relationships, we valorise the one who waits. The one who pines. The one who’s been friend-zoned, as if proximity and patience are somehow currency for love.

Courtly love never died. It just updated its font.

Courtly love taught men that they could construct entire identities around unrequited love, and still be the hero. It taught women that they were most powerful when they were silent, distant, and beautiful. It embedded shame, control, and erotic guilt into the bedrock of modern romance.

Desire, real, mutual, embodied, is terrifying to people who seek control. It’s chaotic. It undoes social order.

So patriarchy invented a workaround: channel desire into suffering. 

Remove sex, keep the power. Take away the woman’s voice, keep her silhouette. Exalt longing. Punish fulfillment.

Courtly love is gothic. It’s erotic without release. Sacred without salvation. It’s the sound of your own heart in the dungeon. The iron mask of virtue, too tight to breathe through.

And underneath it all?

The horror of wanting.

The horror of being wanted.

The horror of what they did to keep you on the pedestal.

Courtly love wasn’t about women at all.

It was about male suffering. Male power. Male performance, dressed in romantic agony.

So here’s the truth they never taught in medieval lit class:

Love is not a game of power. Devotion should not be one-sided suffering. Longing should not be fetishised over connection. You are not a prize. You are not a pedestal. You are not a haunting.

You deserve love that touches.

Love that listens.

Love that doesn't demand your silence for someone else’s poetry.

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com