C.S. Lewis published The Allegory of Love in 1936.
The full title is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. It is a scholarly examination of medieval and Renaissance literature, especially the ways writers represented love through allegory. The book helped establish Lewis’s reputation as an important literary scholar before his best-known Christian apologetic works appeared.
Lewis analyzed works and traditions associated with figures including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. Its approach connects literary history with the intellectual and cultural assumptions of earlier periods.
The book is sometimes confused with Lewis’s later popular writing, such as The Four Loves or Mere Christianity. Unlike those works, The Allegory of Love is primarily an academic study of literary tradition and medieval ideas about love.