C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love was first published in 1936. The book is a study of medieval literary traditions, especially allegorical treatments of love in European poetry.
The work examines how writers from the Middle Ages represented love through personification, symbolism, and elaborate poetic conventions. Lewis discusses authors including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and Edmund Spenser, connecting medieval literature with later developments in English poetry.
The book helped establish Lewis’s reputation as a serious literary scholar before his most famous Christian apologetic and imaginative works appeared. It is sometimes confused with The Four Loves, which is a much later book about different forms of human affection. The Allegory of Love belongs to Lewis’s academic criticism and reflects his expertise in medieval and Renaissance literature.