What was C.S. Lewis’s academic subject at Cambridge when he became a professor in 1954?

In 1954, C.S. Lewis became a Cambridge professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature.

The appointment was at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he became the first holder of the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature. He had previously spent most of his academic career at Oxford, teaching English at Magdalen College from 1925.

Lewis’s scholarship was closely connected to medieval and Renaissance texts. He studied and wrote about allegory, literature, Christianity, mythology, and the intellectual world of earlier centuries. His academic books include The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, published in 1954.

The Cambridge appointment is sometimes confused with his Oxford fellowship or with his popular identity as a Christian writer and novelist. Those descriptions are accurate parts of his life, but the specific professorship concerned literature from the medieval and Renaissance periods.