What is the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1936 study of medieval allegorical literature?

The Allegory of Love is C.S. Lewis’s 1936 study of medieval allegorical literature.

The book examines the development of allegorical writing and the idea of courtly love in medieval and Renaissance literature. Lewis discusses works and traditions associated with authors such as Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser.

The study helped establish Lewis’s reputation as a serious literary scholar before his fame as a Christian apologist and children’s novelist. Its argument connects literary conventions with broader changes in how love and human relationships were imagined.

The title is sometimes confused with Lewis’s later critical works, especially A Preface to Paradise Lost and The Discarded Image. Those books address different subjects: Milton’s epic in the first case, and the medieval and Renaissance model of the universe in the second.