What was C.S. Lewis’s first published scholarly book on medieval literature?

The Allegory of Love was C.S. Lewis’s first published scholarly book on medieval literature. Published in 1936, it examines allegorical love poetry from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance.

The book’s subtitle is A Study in Medieval Tradition. Lewis traces changing ideas about courtly and allegorical love, discussing writers and works including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. Its success helped establish Lewis as a major literary scholar before his best-known Christian and children’s books appeared.

The title can be confused with The Discarded Image, another important study of medieval and Renaissance thought, but that later book was published in 1964. A Preface to Paradise Lost concerns John Milton’s epic, while English Literature in the Sixteenth Century belongs to Lewis’s later Oxford history of literature.