C.S. Lewis published The Allegory of Love in 1936. The full title is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, and the book examines how medieval and Renaissance writers represented love through allegorical forms.
The study begins with the classical and medieval background of allegory and then discusses major English poets, including Edmund Spenser. Lewis’s scholarship connects literary technique with intellectual history, showing how ideas about love, morality, and personification developed across periods.
The book established Lewis as a significant literary historian before his best-known Christian apologetic and fantasy works reached their widest audiences. It also helped secure his academic reputation at Oxford, where he was teaching at Magdalen College.
The Allegory of Love is not a novel and does not present the Narnia stories. Its subject is literary tradition, particularly the medieval inheritance that shaped later English poetry. Readers sometimes encounter it alongside Lewis’s later books and mistake it for a work of popular theology, but it is fundamentally a work of literary criticism.