C.S. Lewis studied the courtly love tradition in his 1936 book The Allegory of Love.
The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition examines how medieval and Renaissance writers represented love, especially the idealized and often highly stylized tradition known as courtly love. Lewis traces this tradition through literary works rather than treating it as a simple description of ordinary romantic relationships.
The book helped establish Lewis as a major literary scholar. It discusses authors and texts including Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. Lewis’s analysis emphasizes how allegory and literary conventions shaped the way love was portrayed across historical periods.
The work is academic criticism, not a novel or a work of Christian apologetics. Readers sometimes associate it mainly with Lewis’s later religious writing, but its subject is medieval literary history. Its publication in 1936 preceded his best-known fiction and popular theological books.