What was C.S. Lewis’s first major scholarly book, published in 1936?

The Allegory of Love was C.S. Lewis’s first major scholarly book, published in 1936.

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition examines allegorical love literature from the medieval period through the Renaissance. Lewis discusses courtly love and analyzes works including Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s poetry, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The book established his reputation as a serious literary scholar and won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937.

The title is sometimes mistaken for a work of fiction because it sounds like one of Lewis’s imaginative books. It is instead a work of literary criticism and intellectual history. Lewis later wrote other important scholarly studies, including English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, published in 1954, and The Discarded Image, published in 1964.