What medieval literature subject did C.S. Lewis hold at Cambridge from 1954?

C.S. Lewis held the Cambridge chair of Medieval and Renaissance English from 1954.

In 1954, Lewis left his long Oxford teaching post after being appointed the first holder of the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The appointment recognized his standing as a literary scholar, particularly his work on medieval and Renaissance texts and the history of English literature.

Lewis’s academic writing included The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, published in 1954. His scholarship ranged across medieval allegory, Renaissance literature, literary history, and the imaginative traditions that also influenced his fiction.

The Cambridge position should not be confused with a general professorship in theology or creative writing. Lewis was widely known as a Christian apologist and novelist, but his university chair was specifically an English-literature post. He remained at Cambridge until his death in 1963.