C.S. Lewis published The Allegory of Love in 1936. The scholarly study examines allegorical treatments of love in medieval literature and became an important work in Lewis’s academic career.
The book’s subtitle is A Study in Medieval Tradition. Lewis discusses the development of allegorical love poetry and prose, including the influence of courtly love and medieval literary conventions. Its research and argument helped establish his reputation as a serious literary historian before his popular Christian books and Narnia novels made him internationally famous.
The Allegory of Love is sometimes confused with Lewis’s later works because many were published during the same productive period. The Pilgrim’s Regress appeared in 1933, while The Screwtape Letters appeared in 1942. Lewis’s career combined literary scholarship, poetry, imaginative fiction, and Christian apologetics, but this title belongs specifically to his medieval-literature scholarship.