What medieval poem did C.S. Lewis study in his 1936 scholarly book The Allegory of Love?

C.S. Lewis’s 1936 scholarly book The Allegory of Love examines the medieval poem Roman de la Rose as a major example of allegorical love literature. The work was written in Old French and became one of the most influential texts of medieval European culture.

Lewis’s study traces how medieval writers transformed classical and courtly ideas about love into allegorical narratives. He compares Roman de la Rose with English and continental authors, including Chaucer, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The book helped establish Lewis as a major literary historian before his popular Christian works made him internationally famous.

Roman de la Rose is not a single-author poem in the modern sense: Guillaume de Lorris began it in the thirteenth century, and Jean de Meun greatly expanded it later. Lewis’s analysis therefore considers changing literary conventions across generations. The Allegory of Love won the Hawthornden Prize and remains important for understanding Lewis’s expertise in medieval and Renaissance literature.